I’m in my late 30s so it’s increasingly difficult to have real friendships. A big part of maintaining relationships as you get older is making an effort to keep in contact even when you have other responsibilities. I have three days a week where I call my various friends and play games. One group is from university, another are more recent work friends, and the longest running time is my friend in Japan.
This is my all-too-serious response to a joke question.
Ha, I feel this.
I've had basically the same friend group for the last 15 or so years and we've mostly all worked together, live close to each other, in theory shouldn't be short on friends.
But COVID happened and a lot of people seemed to get more hermit-y after that and mostly almost all of us have had kids in the last 5 years. And holy hell does having kids make keeping friendships difficult. As far as I can tell, there are basically two schools of parenting :
1) Parents who want to keep living their own lives and feel like the best way to raise happy, worldly children is to have happy, fulfilled parents who drag them on adventures, make dumb mistakes, learn from experience, etc.
2) Parents who literally press pause on their lives and stop everything they used to do to be hugely emotionally invested in their children, prioritize their children above all else, design literally everything they do around their kids and taking them to children-themed events/activities/etc.
We've tried really, really hard to stay in group (1) but probably 75% of our friends have gone hard-out into group (2) and ... they suck now. Good luck every hanging out in any sort of way that isn't designed around children. Good-bye fun banter and fun adventures. Instead it's 'we're going to the petting zoo in the park at 10 am but we have to be back for their 11:30 nap, do you want to join?' and ... no. Most of what we do every day is based around children - like it or not - and I don't want my friend time to be more kid time. You're my friend. Your kids are probably nice but they aren't my friends. And I'm not saying (2) is bad parenting - our kid-centered friends are all great people and great parents - but it seems like a lot of them have really lost themselves. Like, you used to have interests! You used to be a fun unique person! And now ... not so much.
And then on top of that a few of our friends that are actually still themselves and still interesting have mortgaged themselves beyond belief and literally can't afford to do anything, ever.
So in like 5 years we've gone from a circle of like 25 people I could properly grown-up hang out with on any given day to like 4. And man - it's hard as f*** to make new friends after age 35.
So yeah, my poker nights are precious as f***.
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