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> Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships. I was essentially trained to have a timer on my friendships: approxima

> Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships. I was essentially trained to have a timer on my friendships: approximately 3-5 years. In my time we didn't have the internet so once I moved it was over. I don't mean to belittle the specific challenges/hardships of your childhood, but I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common. my childhood was almost the one you wish you had: I went to school with the same kids K-12 and I have a brother two years younger than me. I can't say it worked out much differently for me though. outside of the main clique, which I was not part of, all the friend groups seemed to get scrambled up every few years as people got older and grew apart. I had tables where I was welcome to sit at lunch throughout school, but it took me halfway through highschool to find a good group of friends. most of my classmates came from well-off families, so it was expected that we would go to college out-of-state. so we all went off to different colleges across the country. I'm now the only one from my highschool friend group to live in our home state. I made some good friends in college too, but again, we were all going to school far away from home, so we naturally went our separate ways after graduating. I'm not sure whether it's better to be exposed early or sheltered for a while, but I think this is just the nature of our world. people move around in search of the best opportunities, making new friends and losing track of old ones along the way. as a CS major, I can get at least a decent job pretty much anywhere, but most people aren't this lucky. after living a different life in a different place for a few years, memories start to be the only things you have in common with your old friends.

joncrane 6y ago
Regardless of whether the average friendship length is similar, being FORCED to abandon your friends based on someone else's schedule is much more traumatic than friends entering and exiting your social circle due to the natural cycle of friendship.
- Ntrails 6y ago
  Everything has tradeoffs. Yes living a military childhood has hardships, but it also gives a different, often broader, set of experiences to draw upon. It is easy to grass is greener, to think everything might've been better with a stable steady upbringing in a single location. It might. You might have instead run away from that staid small town and never looked back, hating everything about that narrow minded world. Honestly telling anyone itinerant never to have children is some crazy projection.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I certainly don't presume to tell you how you should feel about your childhood. just saying most people don't actually keep friends all the way through childhood, regardless of the circumstances. at best, they get to delay entering the relationship churn until their late teens or early twenties. as an adult, you might get lucky with a job where you can choose not to move away from your friends, but you don't get to stop them from moving away one by one or all at once to chase opportunities in different places. even my parents, who worked the same jobs and lived in the same house for 25 years don't have the same friends they had when I was a kid. most of those people moved away too.
- awodol 6y ago
  I'll go against the others and agree with you. The best thing that ever happened to me was my family stopped moving every few years and being able to settle in one place during middleschool onwards really helped me a lot. Some of my friends to this day are my core group of middle-school friends, and my mom fought to keep me in district even when we moved within the state.
- disown 6y ago
  > Regardless of whether the average friendship length is similar, being FORCED to abandon your friends based on someone else's schedule is much more traumatic than friends entering and exiting your social circle due to the natural cycle of friendship. No. Losing friends through the "natural cycle of friendship" is just as traumatic or even more so. You are forced to "abandon" your friends regardless. This is true when you switch schools - from elementary school to junior high to high school. The same group of friends you had in your freshman year isn't necessarily the same as you'd have in your senior year. Heck, you can lose friends and make new friends just by having different classes/schedules. People just simply drift apart, fight, etc. Just like people have a romanticized view of your childhood, you seem to have a romanticized view of childhood in the suburbs. Also, losing friends because you have to move falls under "the natural cycle of friendship".
  - cat199 6y ago
    > No. Losing friends through the "natural cycle of friendship" is just as traumatic or even more so. Not like this doesn't happen to those people as well, and in this case you are literally never allowed to have any relationship mature past a handful of years during a key time in development of social skills. Grass is always greener, obviously there will be benefits the person that moved will have that the other didn't recieve, but saying they are the same thing just isn't logically true.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
> I don't mean to belittle the specific challenges/hardships of your childhood, but I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common. Agreed. Even into young adulthood I realized many of my good friends were good friends for a season. We would change as people and the things that once brought us together were no longer engaging for one or both of us. It took me a while to get over this but now I can look back and remember the friends who were great friends then but wouldnt be now.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
BeetleB 6y ago
The difference in your case is the changes were not step functions. I assume whenever you grew distant from some friends, you had other friends who you weren't distant from - it was staggered. Imagine if one day you have N friends, and the next you have 0 and don't know anybody.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > I assume whenever you grew distant from some friends, you had other friends who you weren't distant from - it was staggered. true-ish when I was a kid. although for most of my childhood I didn't have any friends anyway, either because I didn't "fit in" or because I'm just not a very gregarious person. since the age of eighteen, I've had the step-wise N to zero several times: once when I graduated highschool and went to college out of state, again when I transferred schools, and most recently when I graduated college and got a job. I'm not saying it doesn't suck, just that it's not particularly unusual, at least for adults. having only lived one path, I can't really say whether it's better to be exposed to this reality early, or to be mostly sheltered from it until after highschool.
bergstromm466 6y ago
> I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common It's not really the 3-5 year thing though. it's about whether you have supportive weak-tie friendships with people that you can easily visit [1][2], something I believe is especially missing for men in our current society [3]. Are you able to go and see people that hold some of your story - who you can lean on when things get rough in certain periods of your life? If there are thousands of kilometres in between you and you need to take expensive flights - because your parents continually moved/uprooted you to countries on the other side of the world (my case) - then the answer is no. This is a reality I am starting to wake up to. I have a lot of unprocessed and unexpressed grief about this, having grown up all over the world during my youth. I do not have many weak-tie friendships. it fucking sucks. big time. To me 'internet friends' are not a good replacement for in person physical friends who you can go and get a hug from, share some of your sorrows from daily life with, drink tea with, or hang out and watch TV or do your favorite shared activity with. There is a well-known researcher who researched kids in highly mobile families who wrote a book called 'Third Culture Kids' [4]. I found it very insightful. Essentially the book coins the term 'Third Culture Kid' to describe a child who was raised in a foreign culture+country during their formative years (before 18). It has been useful to me to find communities online. There are now important arguments coming forward [5] that promote a wider use of this term, as it has mainly been used for childen in white upper-class circles. [1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-why-your-weak-tie-friendships-may-mean-more-than-you-think https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-why-your-weak-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/smarter-living/why-you-need-a-network-of-low-stakes-casual-friendships.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/smarter-living/why-you-ne... [3] https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/ https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/tox... [4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/121920.Third_Culture_Kids https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/121920.Third_Culture_Kid... + https://www.cmhnetwork.org/news/the-trouble-with-third-culture-kids/ https://www.cmhnetwork.org/news/the-trouble-with-third-cultu... + https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home/transcript... [5] https://gal-dem.com/third-culture-kid/ https://gal-dem.com/third-culture-kid/

joncrane 6y ago

Regardless of whether the average friendship length is similar, being FORCED to abandon your friends based on someone else's schedule is much more traumatic than friends entering and exiting your social circle due to the natural cycle of friendship.

Ntrails 6y ago
Everything has tradeoffs. Yes living a military childhood has hardships, but it also gives a different, often broader, set of experiences to draw upon. It is easy to grass is greener, to think everything might've been better with a stable steady upbringing in a single location. It might. You might have instead run away from that staid small town and never looked back, hating everything about that narrow minded world. Honestly telling anyone itinerant never to have children is some crazy projection.
leetcrew 6y ago
I certainly don't presume to tell you how you should feel about your childhood. just saying most people don't actually keep friends all the way through childhood, regardless of the circumstances. at best, they get to delay entering the relationship churn until their late teens or early twenties. as an adult, you might get lucky with a job where you can choose not to move away from your friends, but you don't get to stop them from moving away one by one or all at once to chase opportunities in different places. even my parents, who worked the same jobs and lived in the same house for 25 years don't have the same friends they had when I was a kid. most of those people moved away too.
awodol 6y ago
I'll go against the others and agree with you. The best thing that ever happened to me was my family stopped moving every few years and being able to settle in one place during middleschool onwards really helped me a lot. Some of my friends to this day are my core group of middle-school friends, and my mom fought to keep me in district even when we moved within the state.
disown 6y ago
> Regardless of whether the average friendship length is similar, being FORCED to abandon your friends based on someone else's schedule is much more traumatic than friends entering and exiting your social circle due to the natural cycle of friendship. No. Losing friends through the "natural cycle of friendship" is just as traumatic or even more so. You are forced to "abandon" your friends regardless. This is true when you switch schools - from elementary school to junior high to high school. The same group of friends you had in your freshman year isn't necessarily the same as you'd have in your senior year. Heck, you can lose friends and make new friends just by having different classes/schedules. People just simply drift apart, fight, etc. Just like people have a romanticized view of your childhood, you seem to have a romanticized view of childhood in the suburbs. Also, losing friends because you have to move falls under "the natural cycle of friendship".
- cat199 6y ago
  > No. Losing friends through the "natural cycle of friendship" is just as traumatic or even more so. Not like this doesn't happen to those people as well, and in this case you are literally never allowed to have any relationship mature past a handful of years during a key time in development of social skills. Grass is always greener, obviously there will be benefits the person that moved will have that the other didn't recieve, but saying they are the same thing just isn't logically true.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

> I don't mean to belittle the specific challenges/hardships of your childhood, but I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common. Agreed. Even into young adulthood I realized many of my good friends were good friends for a season. We would change as people and the things that once brought us together were no longer engaging for one or both of us. It took me a while to get over this but now I can look back and remember the friends who were great friends then but wouldnt be now.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

BeetleB 6y ago

The difference in your case is the changes were not step functions. I assume whenever you grew distant from some friends, you had other friends who you weren't distant from - it was staggered. Imagine if one day you have N friends, and the next you have 0 and don't know anybody.

leetcrew 6y ago
> I assume whenever you grew distant from some friends, you had other friends who you weren't distant from - it was staggered. true-ish when I was a kid. although for most of my childhood I didn't have any friends anyway, either because I didn't "fit in" or because I'm just not a very gregarious person. since the age of eighteen, I've had the step-wise N to zero several times: once when I graduated highschool and went to college out of state, again when I transferred schools, and most recently when I graduated college and got a job. I'm not saying it doesn't suck, just that it's not particularly unusual, at least for adults. having only lived one path, I can't really say whether it's better to be exposed to this reality early, or to be mostly sheltered from it until after highschool.

bergstromm466 6y ago

> I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common It's not really the 3-5 year thing though. it's about whether you have supportive weak-tie friendships with people that you can easily visit [1][2], something I believe is especially missing for men in our current society [3]. Are you able to go and see people that hold some of your story - who you can lean on when things get rough in certain periods of your life? If there are thousands of kilometres in between you and you need to take expensive flights - because your parents continually moved/uprooted you to countries on the other side of the world (my case) - then the answer is no. This is a reality I am starting to wake up to. I have a lot of unprocessed and unexpressed grief about this, having grown up all over the world during my youth. I do not have many weak-tie friendships. it fucking sucks. big time. To me 'internet friends' are not a good replacement for in person physical friends who you can go and get a hug from, share some of your sorrows from daily life with, drink tea with, or hang out and watch TV or do your favorite shared activity with. There is a well-known researcher who researched kids in highly mobile families who wrote a book called 'Third Culture Kids' [4]. I found it very insightful. Essentially the book coins the term 'Third Culture Kid' to describe a child who was raised in a foreign culture+country during their formative years (before 18). It has been useful to me to find communities online. There are now important arguments coming forward [5] that promote a wider use of this term, as it has mainly been used for childen in white upper-class circles. [1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-why-your-weak-tie-friendships-may-mean-more-than-you-think https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-why-your-weak-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/smarter-living/why-you-need-a-network-of-low-stakes-casual-friendships.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/smarter-living/why-you-ne... [3] https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/ https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/tox... [4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/121920.Third_Culture_Kids https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/121920.Third_Culture_Kid... + https://www.cmhnetwork.org/news/the-trouble-with-third-culture-kids/ https://www.cmhnetwork.org/news/the-trouble-with-third-cultu... + https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home/transcript... [5] https://gal-dem.com/third-culture-kid/ https://gal-dem.com/third-culture-kid/