Comment by schlowmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schlowmo | Hacker News Reader

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One aspect of this which I find myself often think about is that it takes some deliberation with whom you want to spend your time when you get older if you're not living the usual family life.

I'm in my thirties now and sometimes it feels like there's plenty of time to figure this out. But most of my closest friends are somewhat older than me. Almost none of them have started a family in the traditional sense. Most of the people they were friends with drifted of in their own little family worlds over time. Another good chunk of former friends pursued professional/academic careers which led them to move quite some distances.

And I can really understand their fear that the younger people they befriended (like me) will do the same (which I and my long-term partner are ruling out but they heard a lot of people saying that before doing it anyway).

I find it comforting that we talk about this from time to time and try to reassure each other that there will be a shared future as we get all older together.And I sometimes think this wouldn't happen if we were all the same age. It kind of helps getting the perspective of older friends which have lost track of a whole lot of people during their lifes. At my current age I can feel the impacts getting closer. It's oftentimes a really short way from "friends for life" to "acquaintances from the past".

And I wouldn't mind at all if the roomate analogy of the author would be literally that shared future:

> It’s not dissimilar to a big house with lots of roommates, or even a college dorm — it’s just that the living areas are separated by a few blocks instead of a few feet.

Yea, I think I feel this from the other direction. I'm not that much older than a lot of my friends, but I've lost many of them over the years to marriages and children. Many of them moved across the country or at least a large distance away to facilitate that, but even the ones who stayed nearby justifiably made their life about their spouse or children over their friends, and there was often little to be done to keep myself involved in their life.

On the other end, I've also dealt with many long-term couples without kids who have gone through messy breakups after 5-15 years of relationship, which often left all of their friendships in tatters, if if they didn't move away entirely and cut all contact.

Add to that that many of the single folks I'm friends with are increasingly desperately trying to find a partner and sacrificing time with their friends to make that happen.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm now in a zone where I don't want to move because I don't have somewhere to move to that has more than a couple people I know, and I wouldn't want to lean on them so hard to be my social connection, but increasingly the folks I know where I live now are leaving, physically or emotionally, to make their own life without me.

It's understandable but consistently brutal how fast you can go from someone's best friend to someone they haven't remembered to respond to in months as soon as they have a family of their own.

As I approach 40, I've learned that you can either loosen expectations and make new friends with those around you or be content with a dwindling friend group. Everyone changes over time and many (most?) friendships will not survive unless you are the "event organizer" of your friend group. The people who I was friends with a decade+ ago are completely different people (and so am I!), so its not too surprising that those friendships naturally diminish.

Priorities also change over a lifetime. I used to be the perpetual single person always losing friends that start a family -- now I am the person starting a family and losing what I have in common with the singles. It isn't that I don't enjoy their company; its that priorities change, family comes first, and there's hardly any time left to keep those friendships alive. Families are black-holes for free time, especially as societal expectations have evolved for what is expected of both men and women in the family.

Having been on both sides of this fence, I've had to adapt and continue making new friends. When I was single, I found new single friends that had time for hanging out, video games, bars and parties. With a family now, I make friends that are similarly time-constrained, that can do stuff like double dates or kid hangouts.

The hardest part is actually making new friends, but it is a critical skill if these sorts of things bother you. If you can make new friends, you can move anywhere. I do a lot of volunteer work which naturally leads to 1) meeting a lot of new people and 2) meeting "regulars", which has been a great source of new friendships for myself. It took me a long time to get to this point though -- I spent most of my 20s and early 30s just watching my existing friend group slowly die off, wasting time replacing it with online interactions instead of just going out and finding new friendships.

I appreciate the perspective, and I certainly don't hold anything against the folks who have prioritized other things in their life. The difficulty I've found is often when there used to be some activity or hobby you did with someone, which then becomes harder to continue doing without them. If your usual tennis partner moves away to start a family, it's not just trying to find a new friend, it's trying to find a new friend you enjoy playing tennis with, or upending your schedule to now play less tennis, or stop playing tennis at all.

Perhaps a possible drawback of such an arrangement could be that people change over time, and sometimes you just don't like the new person that they've become.

Maybe you were best friends with a guy 10 years ago. But gradually, the guy has changed fundamentally as a person, and you may not be as confortable with the guy as you used to be.

Hopelessly trying to continue the relationship would serve no purpose.

Well that "arrangement" isn't a marriage of convenience. It can end anytime if we drift apart. We all acknowledge that we are different people then we were before. So is the world.

I'm grateful being around people who know whom I was 10-20 years ago. Some of them know me almost half of my life. And it can sometimes help being reminded of that past-self by other people.

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