I’m wondering how many people have a core group of friends, who came into your life back in ‘the good old days’ (or the ‘bad old days, but we got thru it together’) and have stayed a part of your life ever since.
The gang could have formed back in grade school, or college, or in the military, or wherever. But the end result was the development of a small group of fast friends (say 3-6 people or so, maybe more) who were bonded closely then, and have stayed bonded over intervening decades.
For myself, I developed such a group in college, in the mid 70’s. The five of us lived together on the same hall as freshmen, found housing together for the remainder of our college career and through a bit of med school. And now over 40 years later, we’re still connected. We may go a few years before getting together (it’s been about 5 years since all 5 of us re-united, but at least a few of us meet every year or two.
None of us maintain a real close connection via phone or facebook during times we’re apart, but whenever we reunite in person, it’s like the intervening years never passed. We fall back into the easy rapport and camaraderie we experienced back when young.
Did you have such a group in your past? Do you still? Share your stories!
I’ll add a poll, just so I can get some rough numbers about how many have been in such a group.
Did and do and inbetween as well. My core of friends from early childhood are still part of my life although a fair number have passed. The core group of friends from my teens and early 20s are still in my life but a lot more of them have passed; a lot were quite a few decades older than I was. I guess I’ve had three old gangs and those two are still going strong. The only one that died off was my college circle. I still have close contact with one member of that gang but the rest are just a memory although he does hear from them now and then.
I have three, the first two of which came together at similar times, and for similar reasons.
The core of my original Dungeons & Dragons group, which I joined in 1982, when I was 17 (they had been together for a couple of years when I joined). While the membership of the group ebbed and flowed over the years, there are four of us who have been in that group consistently since '82, and the other three current members have all been in it for 20+ years. As we’re spread out a bit now, geographically, we’re only able to get together to play a few times a year, but that includes two multi-day gaming sessions (one in the spring, one in the fall).
My college D&D group, which initially formed around an ad I had put up on the bulletin board at my dorm, in 1983. There’s seven or eight of us who are still in close touch with each other (mostly through Facebook these days, as we’re even more geographically dispersed than the first one), but it’s definitely a case of “even though we haven’t talked in months, it’s like picking right back up with the conversation.” It’s also a ridiculously over-educated group – there are five Ph.D.s in the group, and I’m the educational lightweight, with only my MBA.
The group of friends through whom I met my wife, in the late 1980s; its genesis was a group of high school friends from the late 1970s and early 1980s (and, thus, I’m now friends with a bunch of my wife’s high school friends). Many of us used to work together at the Renaissance Faire in the 1990s, as well, and we still get together regularly for dinner and socializing; one of the other couples in the group lives two blocks from us, so we see them very often.
There was a core group of us that knew each other back in high school, or shortly thereafter through working at the local backpacking store. We started spending Thanksgiving out in the desert back in the early 1980s, and kept it up for more than 30 years. These days we are more scattered across the country, and my back would prefer spending Thanksgiving at a 5-star resort like Wynn Las Vegas than sleeping on the ground. But we still sorta keep in touch via Facebook.
Did and do. I met them through my college gaming club back in the early to mid '80s. We played an incredibly intense campaign for a year (the kind of thing where we played multiple times a week, and spent way more time out-of-game thinking about what we’d do when we were back in game. It was an amazing year, especially since I’m an introvert and don’t make friends easily. I married one of them (coming up on 30 years next year) and several more moved to the Bay Area out of college (they were mostly engineers). We don’t get together as often as we used to due to everybody’s crazy schedule, but I still feel very close to them and we keep in touch on Facebook.
We were the group from high school who didn’t go away to college and/or remained in the area after college (though we didn’t all necessarily know each other in high school). Only now, 20+ years later, have a couple of us moved away to other places, but we’re all still “family.”
I have a core group of about a dozen guys, mostly my college fraternity brothers, who I’ve stayed in touch with for the past 20 years. There are about 5 who still live in and around New York and we get together a couple of times a year. The rest are scattered, but we do hang out on occasion. Mostly weddings and special events. Probably the most interesting being a wedding in some shore town outside Sao Paulo, Brazil.
There’s another group of guys I’m still friends with from a company we worked at around ten years ago.
There was a group of us that met in high school band in the '70s. Some of us ended up in Boulder, CO at the university or working in town. In Boulder we met some more people that became close. After a few years we all drifted away from Boulder but still keep in touch through facebook, email, and sometimes in person when I go to Colorado on vacation or they come to NYC (more rare).
All my friends from my youth have gone our separate ways. One went into the army, then prison after he deserted, one was a housecleaner the last i knew, another a housewife and one went to work for micron semiconductor. I saw his name as a signatory on one of their patents a few years ago. I went the army route myself and into bluecollar/trades after, but no ucmj or prison time for me. Beyond that i don’t know what happened to any of them. It just isn’t my way to cling to past relationships like that, if too many years have gone between contacts. It would be like like meeting a stranger wearing a face you know
There were several boys in the neighborhood that I grew up with and went to church with, but they got into drugs and stealing things back in junior high school so the last we were friends was about 6th grade.
Was part of a group of friends in college, but I wasn’t really a core member. I had become friends with a guy in freshman chemistry. He went on to major in mechanical engineering and I was in EE. The group was mostly members of a Hispanic engineering student group and those members were a lot closer.
I went off to live in Japan in 1990 before any of us had email or internet and I didn’t attempt to keep in contact.
My wife has two close friends from kindergarten! They went to different junior high schools, high schools and universities, but have been best friends for 40 years despite one of them living in America for a while and my wife living in Japan for 17 years.
No, through a combination of my personality and the fact I never lived in one place long enough.
I’m most comfortable alone. I don’t feel much of a need to socialize, although when I’m doing it, I tend to enjoy it. Therefore, I can easily go years without having a friend, or anything more than people I share work or school with and can hold a small talk conversation with.
I also, as I said, moved around quite a bit as a kid, so I lost contact with the group I lived near in Missouri when I moved to Minnesota, and I lost contact with the kid I was friends with in Minnesota when I moved to Montana, and the group I was with in high school in Montana fell apart without a trace after high school… long-term social cohesion wasn’t going to happen, whether I wanted it or not.
I am part of a group of friends from grade school. We get together once a month for drinks and gossip. I have known these people for 60 years.
I am also part of a Facebook group that started in the late 90s as a group of regulars in an AOL chat room called “The Book Shelf.” Although he has gone on to fame and fortune without looking back, Anthony Bourdain was part of that chat room group
I have a core group of friends from high school that I still keep in touch with, but I haven’t talked to them much lately, mainly because my interests and theirs have diverged over the past ten years. Their social and political views have shifted to the extreme right while mine have moved more toward the left. They have become more religious while I have become an atheist. I think about them from time to time, and while I miss them, I find myself not feeling so stressed when I am in their company because I don’t have to listen to them spout out their politics or religious views that I don’t agree with, which seems to be quite often when I do talk to them.
Yep - its a somewhat large and diverse group - honestly a gang more than a core group of friends. But we have known each other forever. They include people I’ve known since I was seventeen (a group that includes my husband) and my “new best friend” of a year - who has existed in my circle of friends since the 1980s, but who I just really got to know last year. They include people who live half the country away, who I see once a year or less, but who I’ve known and hung out with for so long that distance and time are meaningless. It includes my old boyfriends and my husband’s old girlfriends (and we’ve been married long enough that our children are adults). There are some distinct groups - and some of the members don’t know one another - not everyone in my bookclub knows everyone in my gaming group - but half of the guys in my gaming group have wives that are in my bookclub. And its become weirdly intergenerational as our kids have become young adults.
Not really a group, but I have some very old friends. In fact in 2 weeks a guy I’ve known since second grade is coming to visit for a long weekend. We have gone years without talking at times, but once we start again it’s like no time has passed at all.
Not a complaint, or a whine – but I seem always to occupy the periphery of groups, never the core.
Looking back now (in my 60’s) I wonder if early events tend to push someone onto the tenure track for solitude. The small scrawny kid gets bullied and pushed outside the group, likely missing opportunities to learn subtle social skills, which push him further to the edge, missing more opportunities, etc. Faced with few choices, the kid pursues more solitary pastimes/hobbies which aren’t shared by the in-group, which further isolate him (the others aren’t interested). As an adult, he gravitates to more isolated jobs out of necessity, furthering the lack of socializing.
Like Derleth above, I’ve found myself preferring solitude over time. My career track has wound thru truck driver, night shift lineman, crane operator*, and even now in uber-mega-corp I’m by myself doing lab work and often go an entire day without interacting with others.
*If anything, this is the perfect metaphor for my life: Part of the team, but isolated and separate.
I’ve got a close group of friends from college. Some I see weekly, some I see every few years. But we do weddings, funerals, graduations, birthday get togethers. We still know each other well, and I know I could go to any of them for any kind of help.
