Different friends for different stages in life.

[angel_in_view]

Hello. I haven't been to the board in a while, but wanted to come back to pose a question to you all. I'm curious as to what others think.

Does anyone on here believe that you end up having different friends depending on what goes on in your life? I remember a next door neighbor saying this to me about 7 or 8 years ago. She told me to just get ready, bc it would end up happening to me once things started changing in my life. At that time, I wasn't married/didn't have kids. That sounded so weird to me bc at the time, I hadn't experienced anything like that. I thought, "oh well, that'll never happen to me bc I'm close to my girlfriends."

Well, it ended up happening and frankly, I think its silly. I say this bc when it comes to friendship, it shouldn't matter what's going on in your life. If I'm your friend, I'm your friend..end of story. I have been friends w/a girl for about 8 yrs. She has 2 kids..I don't have any. Once her oldest hit 16, its as if our friendship started taking a nose dive. We used to get together once a month for lunch, but now here it is July and I haven't seen her since December. The last time we were 2gether, the conversation was brutal. Its like we covered everything in about 20 min & the rest of the time was spent w/her talking about her daughter & how the teenage years are really hard on a parent. I was attentive and truly enjoyed my time w/her, but it seems like conversation w/us now is like pulling teeth. She doesn't call or text like she used to and its just made me very irritated & sad. My husband said although it makes me sad, I should understand that people just drift off in different directions sometimes. Well, I don't believe in that mess! Just bc one friend has kids and others don't, you can't be friends anymore? True, I don't have that "kid connection" w/her, but we still have the other things in common. Plus, we were friends before the kids hit their teenage years. I just don't believe in "dropping" people like that. What REALLY makes this a frustrating situation is that a couple of years ago, this friend came to ME crying & upset bc she worked w/a girl who for some reason gradually stopped talking w/her and now doesn't talk to her at all. When she talked to someone (not me) about it @ work, the person told her, "well, she's married now and has her own life w/her hubby." Ok, really? That made NO sense to me at all. I told my hubby its like she doesn't remember how it felt when SHE was being treated like that...but now she's doing ME like that.

To me, its all about effort. If you consider someone a friend, you should put in just as much effort as the other person.

 

[Barbaloot]

It would be nice if friends stayed friends throughout different life circumstances, but it unfortunately usually ends up as you described.
Not many people seem to be willing to put the effort in, or they end up thinking they are somehow different or maybe even better than you in some way, or that you simply can't relate to them anymore. It sucks regardless of the reason, I wish people were more loyal, but generally they are not. I just expect to be disappointed. I'm sorry you're having to deal with that though.

 

[Badjedidude]

It would be nice if friends stayed friends throughout different life circumstances, but it unfortunately usually ends up as you described.

I sometimes think that it's the same for love interests and romance.

But maybe that's my cynical side speaking.

Not many people seem to be willing to put the effort in, or they end up thinking they are somehow different or maybe even better than you in some way, or that you simply can't relate to them anymore. It sucks regardless of the reason, I wish people were more loyal, but generally they are not. I just expect to be disappointed.

I wouldn't say it's primarily always a lack of loyalty that causes friendships to fizzle out... sometimes people simply change and grow. In my opinion, if you AREN'T learning and gaining wisdom, gaining new opinions and new ways to perceive things... then you aren't growing as a human. And if you're changing like that, then it's only natural for your interests and friendship (as well as love/romantic) needs to change over time as well.

*shrug*

Sure, a lot of it is simply that people don't put into friendships the amount of effort that they should.

But I also think there's an element of natural change of interests at work here.