So the best advice I would give anyone is spend your college years making friends because in my experience your ability to make and maintain friendships falls o

So the best advice I would give anyone is spend your college years making friends because in my experience your ability to make and maintain friendships falls off a cliff after college. The first issue is your friendships begin tracking your life stage. Using a normative example, single people will tend to be friends with single people and married people will tend to be friends with other married people. Likewise, people will children will tend to be friends with other people with children. This acts as a shared experience just by proximity. If people aren't in the same life stage that friendship tends to be trasnactional or unstable. By "transactional" I mean you might be friends with people in your softball league or who play basketball with on the weekend but mostly those friendships will tend to revolve around that common interest or activity. maybe that'll develop into a deeper friendship but the odds are against it. Likewise, you will develop "work friends" by virtue of spending so much of your time at work. For the most part however these aren't friends at all. If you leave that job, that shared shared experience ends and you will likely never see them again. Maybe you'll promise to catch up. Maybe it'll happen once or twice but again it's now in an unstable state and won't tend to last. As time goes on your friends will be replaced by family. The only way friendships in adulthood tend to survive (IME) is by scheduled activities. You set the expectation that that's what you'll be doing at a particular day and time. That's why you'll see sports so often here because a softball game needs to be played at a particular place and time. Pick-up basketball however is less the case for this so you'll likely see the same people less. It's also why parenthood tends to spell the end for many such friendships. If you have 2 young children at home it makes it harder to maintain a scheduled activity long-term. There'll be times your children will be sick, you'll need to go to school or whatever.