once a month or three.
I have an active social life but mostly around shared interests, eg book clubs, sports, some activism, etc. Classic friendships not so much, having drifted from childhood friends. Feels like we live in different worlds. My partner has taken that place.
yeah same. i do stuff. i see people. none of them are my friends.
i haven’t had a close regular friendship since my early 20s. mostly because back then we had lots of free time to do nothing but talk about our feelings and shit. once i graduated i no longer had that luxury in life. on the flip side, i was incredibly lonely/depressed most of HS/college sometimes to the point of suicidal thoughts… even though I had many close friends and was socially popular. once i graduated and started spending most of my time alone… i stopped being lonely.
all my old friendships ended because we became radically different people and no longer had any common interests or values. same thing with all my romantic relationships. i never found a partner who wanted to grow or change like I did, so we broke up.
I play DnD with some of my close friends. We also try to get together at one of our houses every once in a while to do “arts and crafts” stuff. Paint figurines, carve pumpkins, gingerbread houses, painting shitty paintings with bob ross. Sometimes we have “scary movie night”, or watch over the garden wall, or a new anime that came out something. Sometimes we’ll go out to do things too, the Zoo, or museums, or a haunted house, or coen maze this time of year. We started doing this after COVID. It seems kinda silly, but having a good excuse to get, like, a half a dozen or so friends together and hang out IRL is honestly great. Sometimes i don’t wanna get up on a Saturday to do it, but I’m always glad I did. It’s hard to come up with excuses to do things in person that aren’t prohibitively expensive, nor infrequent.
I know I have friends, but they’re all technically my wife’s friends and their husbands. We probably socialize once or twice a month, depending on schedules. I love them all, but I have no friends that I socialize with 1:1. It’s always a group event. So in a way it feels like I have no friends.
The one friend that is truly and originally my friend, since middle school, I’ll see maybe once a month if I’m lucky and it’s usually a framily event with our wives and kids. And the time and distance apart feels wider than ever as we’ve gotten older.
Socializing at 40 is… different, and oddly lonely.
what i dont’ get about socializing as a 30-40 something… is how ultra focused it is on money and politics… and almost nothing else. every convo is politics or money related. in money include jobs, houses, cars, and expensive consumer purchasing. or travel/vacations.
i literally haven’t talked about movies/shows/games/books with anyone in like a decade. if i try to bring that topic up people get weirded out and go right back to politics, money, or travel.
all my dates these days only care about my money and my politics too. nobody asks me what i like to do in my free time or what my favorite things are anymore. i saw a date between some younger 20 somethings and they were listing their fav shows/movies and talking about them and I was so incredibly jealous. last time I went on a date where someone asked me about that stuff was like 15 years ago.
i had a date this weekend and all she wanted to know was my politics, my job, my family/education background and what kind of car I drive. It was degrading.
47\
Socializing at 40 is… different, and oddly lonely.
That’s exactly why one of the neighborhood wives reached out to my wife to see if her husband could join our dnd game or otherwise hang out; she was concerned because he didn’t really have friends that he ever saw or spent time with and felt like it was making him feel very lonely.
This last Saturday I invited him and another neighbor over and we had a side splitting time playing Sundefolk. Now we’re discussing him running a campaign for us.That’s the first new social group of people for me in the last 5 years but it’s pretty damn cool knowing there’s at least 2 other fun dads in the neighborhood.
Edited to add some wordy words
Becausebof various political shit happening around the world, my main friendship is gone
36, less than once per month
40, roughly weekly with high variation (sometimes not for over a month sometimes five in a week)
Amazing to see that some people think virtual counts as seeing your friends more than rounds-to-0%
My friends and I play video games and talk for hours on end, I definitely count it.
Online pretty much all the time, in real life twice a week, at choir and at band practice. More when there are concerts.
Depends on the group.
I go climbing with same group at least once a week.
Then I have my big circle of vegan friends, where we try to see each order at least once a month but that can happen more often sometimes.
Then there’s my classic circle of friends I’ve been friends with forever and the same for that, usually once a month.
So even if you disregard my weekly climbing I usually see at least one group of friends every other week but sometimes every week.
Edit: 31 by the way
All my friendships basically dried up and fizzled away by 25. Old friends from school got married, went down different paths than I did, etc.
I’m 38 now and I still occasionally talk to a couple of friends every few months or so (one from middle school and one from high school), but it never goes beyond casual conversation. I haven’t gone out with anyone besides the girlfriend in over a decade.
I feel like you more concisely summarized my early 30s life perfectly. Most of my old friends just went their own way and there’s no major drive to reconnect now. It’s just me, my wife and my son. Everyone else is basically coworkers and my own direct family.
Quite regularly, but only because I coincidentally moved into a house across the road from an acquaintance that became a good friend. We go over each other’s house for tea, or board games, or casual multiplayer video games.
If it weren’t for that proximity I’d say I’d very rarely spend time with friends. Life is busy. Work wants 40 or more hours a week, then you’ve got chores, shopping, study (if you’re doing that, I was studying full time for a year and a bit recently), then you just need time for personal hobbies and relaxation. On top of that, other people can be flaky, or just busy with their own things.
Virtually at least once a week.
In person, about once a month.
i think everyone on this thread should say their approximate location, then DM anyone on your area to see if you’re closer enough to be IRL friends.
I’m in South West Michigan area.
Where is that? Brazil?
No, Brazil is a Terry Gilliam movie from the 80s.
i wish
You guys have friends?
The big fall off is around 28-30 when most people are committing to families. After that you’re lucky to see them once and awhile.
once in a while
👍
Virtually nearly every night I see a friend or two, sometimes I’ll go a week or so without doing this. On the weekends, I virtually see 2-5 of my friends probably 2 a month for the bigger group and 6 or so times for the smaller group (so 6 total gatherings, 2 of which a larger group shows up). Every other weekend I meet in person with a group of 4-5 nearly religiously, to play TTRPGs. Probably once a month I hangout on a Friday with friends from work at like a pub or a beer garden or a pizza place. Once a month (sometimes more) I’ll meet with friends on the week days for dinner or a movie.
All things considered I feel pretty fortunate to have very virtual hobbies so I can meet with people about as much as I want nearly whenever I want to. Still working on getting more friends in my time zone that play the same games as me (I’m a recent immigrant to Germany, most of my gamer friends are still in the US, arc raiders is coming up feel free to PM me if you’re in the EU timezones lol). I’m also fortunate to have made a lot of quick friends at local nerd/queer spaces and am an eternal GM when RPGs are in their golden era. It was/is not hard to find a table of people interested if you fish for a bit in my experience. Honestly I’d like to be doing more in person stuff but my flat isnt fully ready for hosting but when that happens I’ll be adding a monthly board game night and a seasonal party to the mix!
Hope this helps, for what it’s worth.
