What is your relationship with your close friends?

I stopped caring about my high school friends about halfway into sophomore year of college. I think that’s fairly typical. My college friends, on the other hand, are all still close. We get together annually for a pre-Thanksgiving meal and for New Years Eve, and take vacations together. It’s been 8 years since I graduated college. Many of us are married, and we now live all over the country (CA, MD, NY, MA, NH, VA), but I think this group is the “friends for life” group. High School friendships are simply part of my past, and nothing more.

I am considerably older than the OP but I would like to contribute this:

I actually pledged a fraternity my freshman year of college, back when fraternities were important, in the fall of 1967. There were 20 of us inducted that semester. I am still in touch with, or at least know where they are, 17 of them, plus myself of course.

Twelve of us had dinner in 1987, 20 years after starting college and we did the same thing in 1997 and there were ten of us in 2007. Since most of them still live in or around New York City, that is a convenient location.

I am still GOOD friends with three or four of them, meaning that we speak two or three times per year and I try to see a couple of them when I go to New York on business every few months or so.

For the most part, I could call any of them and start a conversation as if we had spoken the prior week, as if there was no interruption of months or years. It is uncanny. Deep down, no one has changed and the familiarity that started in college has remained..

It is not the same with high school acquaintances or kids from the neighborhood (most of these kids are 59 or 60) but, to me, friendships made at 18 are the best.

SRM

I only have one friend who I really keep in close touch with from elementary school anymore and only a few from middle and high school, and I’m only a sophomore in college. I was never really close friends with a lot of people in my high school class (I ended up hanging out with people I worked with and my few friends from elementary school and such), so not talking to people from high school is no big for me. The ones I do have, I don’t talk to as often as I’d like, but we are definitely caught up on each others’ lives, texting and calling occasionally, chatting online frequently, seeing each other when given the opportunity. With those people, it’s like we never left when we see each other.

I am in my 40s. I have 2 bffs that were in first grade with me! One was my friend throughout the school years. The other and I didn’t really get to be close until a couple years after we graduated High School. I have another bff I’ve known since I was a sophomore in H.S. Again, we had common friends, but didn’t become very close until we were over 30. These 3 people are dearer to me than anyone but my son.

Other childhood friends and I drifted apart. But with Classmates and Facebook we have reconnected. I don’t know how close we’ll become, but as we’ve tempered with age, most seem to have an appreciation for how short life is, and how petty the things that drove us apart were.

As people make new connections and develop new interests in college, then focus on careers, intimate relationships, and starting families, they become so busy that it is challenging to stay in touch. True friends don’t track the time between phone calls or keep score of who called whom. They can pick right up where they left off, knowing that the other won’t judge and will be there should they need them.

I have close friends from various parts of my life. One of my dearest is a friend from nursery school who has been in and out of my life over the past 50 years. Two of the others are women I met just before and just after I ahd kids. Each of them knows the secrets of my soul and loves me anyway.

I’ve kept up sporadically with a few friends from high school but none of those friends are as dear to me as the above four.

My last good friend from high school and I stopped being friends about 6 years ago. She moved to LA and got married. We live such different lives now.

My best friend today is one of the first people I met once I got to uni, two are people I used to work with, a couple of really good friends I met as a fan of Soul Coughing, and two are from improv classes I took. And funny enough, they’ve all met each other, save for one!

I have a small group of friends from HS that I still stay in contact with; we usually meet up once or twice a year to see movies and eat pizza.

Other than that, although I make friends easily enough, they don’t tend to stick around after whatever class we shared is over. So I move on.

Great question. I actually like how my situation worked out with my high school friends. I had two best friends in ninth and tenth grade. Then things fell apart, because I was trying to be super badass and rebel and these two friends simply weren’t cool enough, and would bring down the image I was trying to create.

Luckily, I grew up. I am a senior college, and they are once again my two best friends at home, and usually the only ones I see when I’m home. This time of our lives is so confusing and up in the air, have patience. Don’t rule them out as friends for life, but don’t feel like you have to stay in touch.