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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 tha

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.

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.