9 ms·

How Friendships Change Over Time (2015)

155 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

110011 10y ago
Birds of a feather flock together. The truth of this old adage never hit me until my late twenties by which time I had changed places and jobs a few times. Growing up with an ill defined idea of who a friend was, I imagined I would have friends of all kinds around me who would challenge my thinking and perceptions by simply being who they are. Like some carefully assembled bouquet of exotic flowers I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with. I found that people I knew from an earlier period in my life, like a neighbor or a high school friend, came to see me as being different because of the wildly different path I had taken later in life. I would like to imagine that close friends from a young age don't just fade away because you went to a different school or took a different job, but that's how it has played out consistently in my life. In brief encounters with such friends I learnt that they treated me differently and were too eager to put me down, either out of some deep insecurities, afraid of who I was or simply from an effortless nastiness that came to them. I think this (late twenties) is a time when some people become acutely perceptive of keeping score and start playing the status game etc. I uniformly avoid such idiots from my social life, when I just want to hang out without the specter of my career looming over every conversation.
- nosuchthing 10y ago
  I think this (late twenties) is a time when some people become acutely perceptive of keeping score and start playing the status game etc This is a weird thing I've noticed of friends who I now consider as lost to an abyss of work-is-life obsession. I get that work and progress is enjoyable, and time seems valuable when you have a full time job but it's quiet sad to see people disappear into workaholicism.
  - Taylor_OD 10y ago
    I stopped one of my hobbies abruptly 3-4 months ago. I realized how quickly my value and purpose became interconnected with work. I think people end up in work-is-life rut because they don't have other things to occupy their time / brain when they are home so they tend to think about work all the time which makes them talk about work which makes them work and so on. Just started back up with my old hobby and I feel almost immediately better about everything and I think its mainly because I have something else to focus time thinking about and my life feels less singular.
    - ddorian43 10y ago
      Try running 10kms. You'll feel better and think about stuff/work and solve bugs and lose weight and gain muscle all at the same time.
- restalis 10y ago
  "I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with." I was having a large diversity of "friends" before university and I do now have only a narrow subset of people I went through the university that I'm still getting along with, but I think I'm looking at it very differently than you. I haven't had much of a choice before but to deal in an as much graceful manner I could with all that zoo before, and that become like a second nature to me. They called me a friend. It was an easy thing to do for me as well -- to confuse friendship with what I had. I don't think many of us realize how energy draining is the low-choice period of our younger lives. The change that happens in time in this regard is just a natural process.
- pm90 10y ago
  Unfortunately, I seem to have had a similar experience. Perhaps it is bound to happen in this economy when a lot of people are struggling to find decent jobs on the one hand, and you have this group of people involved with Tech who are doing incredibly well...I've made the decision to always live with roommates not in the tech sector, and I made the mistake of revealing once how much I make. Instantly, my roommate's (and his friends') attitude changed after that. I've learned to never make that mistake again.
  - gautamnarula 10y ago
    How did their attitudes change?
    - hfsktr 10y ago
      I am not him but in my case my friends and roommates say things like "You make enough to pay for this/that/whatever", "Why would you look for another job you make good money?" etc. I do make good money for this area or compared to them but that doesn't mean I don't have to be responsible with it.
mattbgates 10y ago
I wish I could know.. I went away to college... years away. It was hard to leave friends, but I knew I'd see and talk to them again someday. Two of my best friends, within weeks of talking to them, they passed away. Both incidents happened years apart, but both died exactly the same way. And both.. I had just recently gotten in touch with again... only to lose both just weeks afterwards. Even sadder.. I had premonitions of "losing a best friend" and I did nothing to warn either of them, ignoring it like it was just a dream, when in reality, it was a vision. But when I did speak to them, it was as if we picked up right where we left off. For the one friend, I hadn't spoken to him in over 4 years. The other friend? At least 6 years. I still call them my best friends because I grew up with them. Life happened and it caused us to not talk as much anymore, but like I said: When they are your best friend.. you pick up right where you left off, no matter how many years apart you were. Both losses caused me to write what was in my heart. One Life, Old Man ... http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/one-life-old-man/ http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/one-life-old-man/ The Loss of a Best Friend ... http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/loss-best-friend/ http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/loss-best-friend/ Certainly a pain that no one should ever have to endure... it is as painful as losing a family member. I cannot call them up. I cannot change what happened.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  > Certainly a pain that no one should ever have to endure And yet... almost everyone does, at one point or another, endure that sort of pain. Perhaps it's better to not have to go through that sort of pain in your youth, but when older and you have more perspective and experience, which may help to put the pain in to a context which may help alleviate it some?
johnny_reilly 10y ago
Fascinating and particularly relevant to my recent life experience. I wrote earlier this year about the realisation that friendship changes, people move on. https://reillysontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/away-we-go.html https://reillysontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/away-we-go.html Upon reflection I think that's ok. You just have to realise that's how life goes. Accept it. Embrace it. Make the best of it. You can't really change it. But, as long as you're at peace with that, well it's fine. C'est la vie
- rpazyaquian 10y ago
  ...Which is why it's important to get in as much as you can while you're young. Unfortunately, not everyone has the foresight to socialize at that age.
erikb 10y ago
Honestly, I was really surprised how little of it is new knowledge. That's not criticism, but maybe the realization that there isn't much more knowledge to gain about friendships, if science knows exactly the same stuff as someone who is in a totally different department. I think maybe it becomes interesting when combined with other relationships like colleagues. If you spend the prime time of your day with someone for 10 years, you also expect them to be dependable to some degree. However in a mostly formal relationship people can get quite surprised about how little they actually can count on their coworkers when sh*t hits the fan. And at the same time many people may spend more time, energy and money into their coworkers than into their dependable friends.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I've read that "friends are the new families", taking on roles that were traditionally reserved for families such as lending money or sharing the burdens of childcare.
  - erikb 10y ago
    In which area of this planet? I wish friends and I would support each other in final struggles, but it's a huge taboo in my country in central Europe.
    - e1g 10y ago
      Living Australia, I had seen money change owners among friends literally dozens of times. Not huge sums ($500-$3,000), but big enough to matter in mid-20s. It felt normal at the time, though in retrospect I can see that most of our families were poor and we had nowhere else to turn save for other young professionals. I'm not sure if that was due to co-dependence or friendship, nor if there is much difference between the two.
    - tasuki 10y ago
      "a huge taboo in my country in central Europe" ... I wonder which country that is. I'm Czech, currently spending lots of time in Poland, acquianted with Slovak and Hungarian culture, and haven't seen this being a "huge taboo".
kornish 10y ago
> In a set of interviews he did in 1994 with middle-aged Americans about their friendships, Rawlins wrote that, “an almost tangible irony permeated these adults discussions of close or ‘real’ friendship.” They defined friendship as “being there” for each other, but reported that they rarely had time to spend with their most valued friends... To what degree does friendship have to do with quantity of time spent, as "being there" suggests, versus quality of time spent? Anecdotally, it seems that people can share deliberately quality time, as determined by some arbitrary and subjective metric, and remain fulfilling friends with each other. It also seems that many conflate quality of time with quantity because spending lots of time with someone (or someones) will yield some moments of that formative quality. Does this observation break down after the social 20s, when people start families and move away? Have you found that raw amount of time spent with someone matters more or less as you grow older?
- pm90 10y ago
  I think its a case-by-case thing. I have friends I hang out with all the time and yet I would never expect to e.g. take me to the ER room at 3am in the morning. And others who I see once a month and can reliably expect them to. At some point, you have a fuzzy mental ranking of all your relationships along certain attributes. So the first friend ranks high on "fun" but low on "dependable", while for the second one it is opposite.
  - ido 10y ago
    As someone who recently needed such assistance, you might be surprised by who will gladly render that support when you actually need it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Lausbert 10y ago
3 month = 0.25 years; 0,25 years / 10 years = 1/40 :)
pingou 10y ago
Reminds me of this poem, I think I read it first time on hacker news. https://allpoetry.com/Around-The-Corner https://allpoetry.com/Around-The-Corner

155 points by DiabloD3 10y ago

Birds of a feather flock together. The truth of this old adage never hit me until my late twenties by which time I had changed places and jobs a few times. Growing up with an ill defined idea of who a friend was, I imagined I would have friends of all kinds around me who would challenge my thinking and perceptions by simply being who they are. Like some carefully assembled bouquet of exotic flowers I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with. I found that people I knew from an earlier period in my life, like a neighbor or a high school friend, came to see me as being different because of the wildly different path I had taken later in life. I would like to imagine that close friends from a young age don't just fade away because you went to a different school or took a different job, but that's how it has played out consistently in my life. In brief encounters with such friends I learnt that they treated me differently and were too eager to put me down, either out of some deep insecurities, afraid of who I was or simply from an effortless nastiness that came to them. I think this (late twenties) is a time when some people become acutely perceptive of keeping score and start playing the status game etc. I uniformly avoid such idiots from my social life, when I just want to hang out without the specter of my career looming over every conversation.

nosuchthing 10y ago
I think this (late twenties) is a time when some people become acutely perceptive of keeping score and start playing the status game etc This is a weird thing I've noticed of friends who I now consider as lost to an abyss of work-is-life obsession. I get that work and progress is enjoyable, and time seems valuable when you have a full time job but it's quiet sad to see people disappear into workaholicism.
- Taylor_OD 10y ago
  I stopped one of my hobbies abruptly 3-4 months ago. I realized how quickly my value and purpose became interconnected with work. I think people end up in work-is-life rut because they don't have other things to occupy their time / brain when they are home so they tend to think about work all the time which makes them talk about work which makes them work and so on. Just started back up with my old hobby and I feel almost immediately better about everything and I think its mainly because I have something else to focus time thinking about and my life feels less singular.
  - ddorian43 10y ago
    Try running 10kms. You'll feel better and think about stuff/work and solve bugs and lose weight and gain muscle all at the same time.
restalis 10y ago
"I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with." I was having a large diversity of "friends" before university and I do now have only a narrow subset of people I went through the university that I'm still getting along with, but I think I'm looking at it very differently than you. I haven't had much of a choice before but to deal in an as much graceful manner I could with all that zoo before, and that become like a second nature to me. They called me a friend. It was an easy thing to do for me as well -- to confuse friendship with what I had. I don't think many of us realize how energy draining is the low-choice period of our younger lives. The change that happens in time in this regard is just a natural process.
pm90 10y ago
Unfortunately, I seem to have had a similar experience. Perhaps it is bound to happen in this economy when a lot of people are struggling to find decent jobs on the one hand, and you have this group of people involved with Tech who are doing incredibly well...I've made the decision to always live with roommates not in the tech sector, and I made the mistake of revealing once how much I make. Instantly, my roommate's (and his friends') attitude changed after that. I've learned to never make that mistake again.
- gautamnarula 10y ago
  How did their attitudes change?
  - hfsktr 10y ago
    I am not him but in my case my friends and roommates say things like "You make enough to pay for this/that/whatever", "Why would you look for another job you make good money?" etc. I do make good money for this area or compared to them but that doesn't mean I don't have to be responsible with it.

mattbgates 10y ago

I wish I could know.. I went away to college... years away. It was hard to leave friends, but I knew I'd see and talk to them again someday. Two of my best friends, within weeks of talking to them, they passed away. Both incidents happened years apart, but both died exactly the same way. And both.. I had just recently gotten in touch with again... only to lose both just weeks afterwards. Even sadder.. I had premonitions of "losing a best friend" and I did nothing to warn either of them, ignoring it like it was just a dream, when in reality, it was a vision. But when I did speak to them, it was as if we picked up right where we left off. For the one friend, I hadn't spoken to him in over 4 years. The other friend? At least 6 years. I still call them my best friends because I grew up with them. Life happened and it caused us to not talk as much anymore, but like I said: When they are your best friend.. you pick up right where you left off, no matter how many years apart you were. Both losses caused me to write what was in my heart. One Life, Old Man ... http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/one-life-old-man/ http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/one-life-old-man/ The Loss of a Best Friend ... http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/loss-best-friend/ http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/loss-best-friend/ Certainly a pain that no one should ever have to endure... it is as painful as losing a family member. I cannot call them up. I cannot change what happened.

mgkimsal 10y ago
> Certainly a pain that no one should ever have to endure And yet... almost everyone does, at one point or another, endure that sort of pain. Perhaps it's better to not have to go through that sort of pain in your youth, but when older and you have more perspective and experience, which may help to put the pain in to a context which may help alleviate it some?

johnny_reilly 10y ago

Fascinating and particularly relevant to my recent life experience. I wrote earlier this year about the realisation that friendship changes, people move on. https://reillysontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/away-we-go.html https://reillysontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/away-we-go.html Upon reflection I think that's ok. You just have to realise that's how life goes. Accept it. Embrace it. Make the best of it. You can't really change it. But, as long as you're at peace with that, well it's fine. C'est la vie

rpazyaquian 10y ago
...Which is why it's important to get in as much as you can while you're young. Unfortunately, not everyone has the foresight to socialize at that age.

erikb 10y ago

Honestly, I was really surprised how little of it is new knowledge. That's not criticism, but maybe the realization that there isn't much more knowledge to gain about friendships, if science knows exactly the same stuff as someone who is in a totally different department. I think maybe it becomes interesting when combined with other relationships like colleagues. If you spend the prime time of your day with someone for 10 years, you also expect them to be dependable to some degree. However in a mostly formal relationship people can get quite surprised about how little they actually can count on their coworkers when sh*t hits the fan. And at the same time many people may spend more time, energy and money into their coworkers than into their dependable friends.

matt4077 10y ago
I've read that "friends are the new families", taking on roles that were traditionally reserved for families such as lending money or sharing the burdens of childcare.
- erikb 10y ago
  In which area of this planet? I wish friends and I would support each other in final struggles, but it's a huge taboo in my country in central Europe.
  - e1g 10y ago
    Living Australia, I had seen money change owners among friends literally dozens of times. Not huge sums ($500-$3,000), but big enough to matter in mid-20s. It felt normal at the time, though in retrospect I can see that most of our families were poor and we had nowhere else to turn save for other young professionals. I'm not sure if that was due to co-dependence or friendship, nor if there is much difference between the two.
  - tasuki 10y ago
    "a huge taboo in my country in central Europe" ... I wonder which country that is. I'm Czech, currently spending lots of time in Poland, acquianted with Slovak and Hungarian culture, and haven't seen this being a "huge taboo".

kornish 10y ago

> In a set of interviews he did in 1994 with middle-aged Americans about their friendships, Rawlins wrote that, “an almost tangible irony permeated these adults discussions of close or ‘real’ friendship.” They defined friendship as “being there” for each other, but reported that they rarely had time to spend with their most valued friends... To what degree does friendship have to do with quantity of time spent, as "being there" suggests, versus quality of time spent? Anecdotally, it seems that people can share deliberately quality time, as determined by some arbitrary and subjective metric, and remain fulfilling friends with each other. It also seems that many conflate quality of time with quantity because spending lots of time with someone (or someones) will yield some moments of that formative quality. Does this observation break down after the social 20s, when people start families and move away? Have you found that raw amount of time spent with someone matters more or less as you grow older?

pm90 10y ago
I think its a case-by-case thing. I have friends I hang out with all the time and yet I would never expect to e.g. take me to the ER room at 3am in the morning. And others who I see once a month and can reliably expect them to. At some point, you have a fuzzy mental ranking of all your relationships along certain attributes. So the first friend ranks high on "fun" but low on "dependable", while for the second one it is opposite.
- ido 10y ago
  As someone who recently needed such assistance, you might be surprised by who will gladly render that support when you actually need it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Lausbert 10y ago

3 month = 0.25 years; 0,25 years / 10 years = 1/40 :)

pingou 10y ago

Reminds me of this poem, I think I read it first time on hacker news. https://allpoetry.com/Around-The-Corner https://allpoetry.com/Around-The-Corner