Losing friends

[trentt]

I think some of us are friends here. I used to have dozens of friends.

Over the past 10 years I've lost most of them.

I lose touch with some. A few, they stop contacting me, it's clear they no longer want a friendship. I wonder what I've done. I dream about it. Then I get over it.

Online friendships are a strange strange breed. I "met" so many people over the years, TT and other boards. I retained a few good friendships, especially Scrubb, Voy, eti, rikita, ilko, incognita ... all people I met many times in real life.

Do you have lifelong friendships? I seem not to have them. They live and die like all things do.

[Voy]

yes I do - but I think a lot of it has to do with the amazing school I went to. I have close friends today whom I "met" when we were 2. Just last weekend I had 2 classmates and their husbands here to dinner. and we have that famous every-Sept-in-Nantucket reunion.

very very lucky! - and then a bunch of similar from college..

to say nothing of you guys and the other forum from TTYC that has been going now for about 17 years...

[shrjeff]

i have one 'active' friend from high school but lots from college - primarily my first year at berkeley in 1960 - with one of whom we are going to the galapagos next month... that said, thanks to the internet my next-door neighbor friend when i was really little has reestablished contact and will be coming into haifa on a cruise so we can show her and her husband around for the day (since we leave for the galapagos trip the next day it's just in time!)... we haven't seen each other since we were 8...

[OnlyMark]

I had one friend once.

He died young though from distemper.

[happytraveller]

My two oldest friends I've been friends with since 5 years old. I guess it helps that we still live close. I have other friens I've had since teenage age and I am sure they will remain friends forever. I have a few online friens that I hope to stay friends with forever too. Some of them I have met, some of them I haven't.

[Kate_R]

I was very touched to see a friend from primary school at my Dad's funeral last week. We lost touch after primary school, met up again for the last two years of high school, and have been back in touch for the last 5 years. It was lovely to have someone who had known Dad from way back when.

Also, it was lovely to see Dad had two friends from his school days turn up - they would have been late 80s, and the friendship would have spanned about 75 years. As Dad was the one who organised their meet ups (referred to by Mum as the boys' lunches) I wonder if the remaining few will get together anymore (actually, one of the guys is looking very frail, so it is unlikely)

Other than that, I have two other friends that go back to primary school days, but we aren't really close anymore, it is the occasional email catch up, or I run into one of them at the shops (yes, after all this time, we still live close to each other - just saw her at the library today). Then there is another good friend from high school days I see a few times each year, and a few others who go back about 20 years.

But having said that, I do feel that often I am a slack friend, as I keep on meeting new people who I click with, and find it hard to find the time for everyone. And it sort of goes some people just fit better for where I am at the moment, and then I will be drift back to the other friends.

I'm sort of explaining it all really badly, I know. Need more wine.

[auntieannie]

I have 1 life-long friend. the others I made as adults and I lost many moving to the UK. But then I made more. It's been less than 9 years now so can't say how it'll go. I find I look for quality rather than quantity over time. in everything. but I've got many acquaintances.

[pizzawheel]

It's one of the ad things about getting older - losing friends. I just found out my friend from first year school is losing his brother to terminal cancer, I found out on an off chance. Seems years of living away in different countries does some damage. Also men's economical telephone habits probably don't help either.

[ninchursanga]

Same than Pizzawheel, moving countries a few times and being away for years on end has not helped to keep some of my friendships going. I wouldn't say that I've lost friends, the friendships just slowly bled out, contact decreased and than came to halt. Facebook for me is a wonderful thing to keep in contact or reestablish some contacts.
After 18 years I'm moving back home and started working on reestablishing some old friendships. Those are 2-3 people that I'm not that close with but over the past 18 years we've always kept in contact and each time I went home I tried to check if we can meet up at least once.

Friendships also dissipate because I tend to get sucked up in the moment of the life I have right now and am not good with thinking of calling soandso or sending letters, emails.

Some friends I'm not in contact with anymore I do genuinely miss.

[trentt]

Kate_R - I'm very sorry to hear your dad died. You have my condolences, truly.

I wrote this thread because a couple of nights ago I had a dream that involved some ex-close-friends. We were in a hallway, and they were ahead of me. We were all talking about someplace we were heading, and then in the dream I thought to myself, "I can't go with them." And I halted, but they kept going, out of my line of vision.

[Voy]

sending {{{{Trentt}}}} - just because.

[auntieannie]

sorry for your loss, Kate! hugs and condoleances.

and hugs to trentt.

[eti]

Trentt, so cool that you mention me! We have not really stayed in touch. I suck at staying in touch. I don't send postcards, I don't know what to write in e-mails. But when I find a board where old friends (you) are active in, of course I get in touch again. And if you ever make it this way again, I'll pick you up at the airport and welcome you at my place.
Last (and only, I think? not sure) time you stayed at my place was before I even had kids, wasn't it? Geez, I'm getting old.

Uh, to your question. Friends come and go. Most don't stay forever. Most of the time I'm the one who still thinks we're friends but, well, staying in touch is not my strongest point, that may have to do with it.
I met my best friend during college, does that count as lifelong?

[itsasmallworld1]

Kate, sorry for your loss! big hug to you and your family.

[trentt]

eti - your wife was pregnant at the time, remember? I included you because we (or at least I) had a great time on that occasion. I shall never forget it.

There are others I didn't mention - Kate_R, for example. And Clipper, her husband. Treacle. Sonora. squish. These are people I'll never forget.

No, we don't stay in touch very well. That doesn't mean you/they are forgotten. My life got complicated, and to be truthful, bad, and I struggled just to make it day to day. My focus shrank to myself, my immediate family, my situation. I haven't traveled anywhere in 4 years. I didn't contact anybody. This is probably why I lost friends.

[missalaska]

I'm actually reading up about impact of loneliness at the moment. I've always been a loner and having many friends really hasn't bothered me that much and big social occasions tend to overwhelm me. Moving here has meant zero friends though, all the people I know who are a similar age have children and are totally obsessed about them and it is all they talk about. I think I'm getting really cantankerous and am withdrawing from social society generally and the more I do this the less I want to be around people. ]Therefore, the impact of the people I work with is greater because I don't have much contact with people, other than them and my husband.

I yearn for decent face to face conversation with people, there are a couple of people I can do this with but they are not the type of people I could say 'let's go for a drink' to, they live it quite different social circles and in this country it is still quite a thing.

I think I've lost a lot of friends and this saddens me. I've had some awful moments over the last few years, someone not allowing me to come to his wedding ( I was in the UK when it was happening and another friend was the best man) - I only wanted to see the civil service - not eat his food or drink his wine. And then this year a couple of my so called best friends didn't wish me for my birthday because my date isn't on fucking FB and it really did my head in, not even when it was their birthdays a couple of weeks later did they even twig that I might have had my birthday, then I wondered, are we actually still friends?

[eti]

Hah, yes I remember she was pregnant. I wasn't sure if that was when you were here.

How are things now, Trentt?

[mapletree3]

This is a very interesting thread, trentt, and it's made me do some thinking about friendships. I realize that I have had some very close and intense friendships that have died through lack of cultivation, physical moves, and lifestyle changes. It's sad when you only realize how out of touch you've become with friends when you hear about their death. I find maintaining friends to be a lot of work, though the rewards are high, and I can only maintain a few good friends at a time. I have loads of people I know and spend time with but only a few who really know the nature of my heart, hopes, and past experiences. I have two very good friends from grade school. The nature of these friendships never wavers, no matter how great the physical distance between us.
Your remark of watching friends move on and knowing you can't go with them struck a chord with me too. As I watch my children grow and develop there own lives I've had moments of feeling left behind and thinking, "where are you going, and why can't I go too?" A natural response I guess after taking them everywhere with me while they were growing up.
Right now my husband is my true best friend in every sense, it makes a marriage so easy.
As far as internet friends. The few experiences I've had actually meeting my imaginary friends from the internet have been very positive.
Thanks again for the great thread...I'm going to go call a friend.

[trentt]

Strangely I am not really sad or morose about my lost friendships. I tend to think that's how it goes, and that's also partly why I started this thread ... to see if that's generally true, or if other people have better outcomes with friendships than I do. I actually have 0 friends from childhood/teen years. I have 2 from college. From post-college years, I only have about 5 (pre-internet) friends. From the internet, I have a few. I've met well over 300 people from online sources.

eti - things are OK. I have a job again, which is good. Being unemployed knocked me for a loop. Then my sister died, which was not unexpected, but still bad. My first interview for this job conflicted with the memorial service for her, so I went to the interview, all the while thinking of everyone else being in the church. I suppose that's why I wasn't nervous. It seemed such a trivial thing, though it was not.

[eti]

That's a very strange coinciding of events. Maybe it was a good thing that you didn't attend the service after all since the interview took you out of a negative spiral.
Most people would probably call and explain the situation and postpone the interview, but I could imagine that would not have ended well in your case.

[trentt]

I was up there that weekend before (the interview was on a Friday) and told everyone about the interview, so in a way it was a bit thoughtless of her daughter and husband to schedule stuff on that very day. Everyone understood why I was absent. I did go to the graveside ceremony (she was cremated) a few weeks later.

It was a surreal time. I went up for my mother's birthday; she turned 87. She and my sister lived in the same apartment building. My mother had a stroke on her birthday, so we were in the hospital with her instead of eating cake. The next day my sister went into the same hospital. So it was kind of convenient, just traveling between floors to see each one. Then after my sister rejected dialysis (she was actually turning incoherent and combative), her daughter and husband decided to discontinue further life support, so she entered hospice. I was there until Tuesday night, she died Wednesday morning, the interview and memorial service were on Friday. My mom recovered. My sister did not.

[sophie]

Sounds like you have been through some tough times, Trentt.. And not having friends to lean on would drive me over the edge. I am very lucky with some friends going back to grade one. I have found that friendships go through cycles, close to some friends at different times, depending on what is happening in our lives. Some friends are now dealing with life threatening illness, and I know as one ages one starts to lose some, but it is hard. A couple of years ago one of my friends had to be institutionalized for dementia.. That is even worse. She doesn't recognize anyone now. I try to have friends of different ages so if I live long enough I will still have some friends!

[trentt]

My best friends died in the 1990s. Well, 2 of them. One died in a lawnmower accident in 1993, then my other friend during surgery in 1999. I had to call all over eastern USA to find someone who knew him, who could tell me he had died. All I knew was his email account was rejecting my messages. I still had many friends after that, but I think when my mom started to go downhill, I focused on family and my friendships suffered. I know I'm doing the right thing. I've got one mom, only one. She is the world to me, and also has tons of memories and information from almost a century ago. No one else can offer that.

[Peromyscus]

I'm a bit of a loner and am bad at keeping up with people. I am in touch, sort of, with a just handful of people from high school and college. I changed, they changed, the ones that slipped away doubtless changed, and I grew up in a transient area plus I moved twice in high school. My circle of close friends is pretty small, though I do have a fair number of casual friends/acquaintances from birdwatching and message boards. Right now my economic situation is such that I can't go too far away too often so I focus on things local.

Kate and trentt, I am sorry to read about your losses. Big hugs to both of you.

[outside cat @wino]

Fascinating post and it made me think about my situation. I am not ON FB and forum wise I catch up with travelling lefty and some others for football and beer. The rest of my mates (5-6) I catch up with when I can.

I am not a social person by any stretch and have some interesting PTSD days where I barely function as a human, thankfully they are rare but they do live somewhere in the back of my head.

I have a mate who rings me on my birthday and without fail it brings me to tears......

[Voy]

several of us have mentioned the difficulty of keeping up friendshiops, which is true - it does take work. But I just want to add, that if you have been really close at some point, and then drift, and then somehow re-connect, that solid base of friendship is still there and can "burst back into flame" right away.

[wikki]

I think friendships are coming and going.
I have some friends form primary school. I would consider them as my best friends. But we don't stay in touch much. But with this friends it doesn't matter. They " show up" if they need and other way around i'll show up if I need them. Sometimes i don't hear from them over years and then every week. Like Voy says above
as long as you benefice from a friendship it will hold. If there is no benefice it will disappear. I don't mean that in a negative way.

Also cuz of my job I have friends all over the world- it is hard to stay in touch. Thats why i think fb is a great thing because it helps to stay in touch- specially with friends on the other side of the world.

[OnlyMark]

I've just remembered I had another friend.

She didn't realise it though until the point where she was tied to my bed.

[Baz Faz]

Here is a curious little episode. Because of my father's job we moved round the world quite a lot - South Africa, Canada, England, South Africa again, all by the time I was 14. Fast forward 35 years. One evening in England there was a knock at my door. A man I didn't recognise announced himself as an old school chum from my English school. I had not seen him since I left and had had no contact at all with him. He chose an evening when my wife was staying with her mother in London so I was on my own. I invited him in and he had a couple of drinks. He said he had been passing near by and went to the local pub and asked for me and they told him where I lived. He seemed a tough character and I was on my own and a bit nervous about him. Eventually he left and I have never heard from him in the 20 years following.

How did he know what town I lived in? How could he be passing by? I had never been to the local pub so they couldn't have given him my address.

I had over the previous years visited quite a few countries behind the Iron Curtain (research for books). So I have a thought as to what he might have been. Just checking up on me.

[missalaska]

Why did you let him through the door Baz? Gives me shivers!