Do your friendships last, or do they have a finite lifespan?
Are you male or female?
I have at least 2 female acquaintances that go for the short-span friendships. There seems to be some jealousy/conflict/unresolved anger that leads to the ending of friendships.
Sure it could be that I know two immature individuals, but I would appreciate any anecdotal evidence that this is gender-based behavior.
I’m female, and my longest standing friends are all guys who I met while in college and have been friends with for between 7 and 10 years.
My friendships with girls don’t last as long. They never have, really. I can’t give a specific reason why, just that the kind of bond that I have with the guys never happened with the girls.
I’m female. I have one good friend (also female) I’ve had since high school (graduated in 1992) who now lives in another state, but we still phone regularly and visit about twice a year.
The rest of my friends are all a community of folks, male and female, singles and marrieds. I met them in 1999. I’m closer to some than others, but the night I had an emergency c-section, there were 16 people waiting for me in the hospital room an hour after I went into surgery. They’re good folks.
I have friends of both genders that span decades. I am male.
I’m male, and I have long-lasting friendships among both men and women.
I’m female, and I’ve also had long lasting friendships with both men and women. These people and I have gone through things, and been there for each other, and now we’re family.
But I think that most friendships do have a lifespan. Lots of the people I socialize with are “work friends” or “activity friends”, and I think that the nature of these relationships is that they seldom survive transistions. You get a new job, or you stop volunteering at that particular place, or your kids quit gymnastics, and as a rule you fall out of touch with the people you met there.
I’m female, and I’ve found that most of my friendships – with both men and women – have been longlasting.
I have a set of long-lasting friendships–people I have been close to since I was 14, and I am almost 30–but I also have a lot of transient relationships. Much of this is the nature of my job–I am a teacher, and a lot of my important relationships (“friendships” isn’t quitre the right word, but it’s similar) are with my students, and those last 1-3 years. It’s right and proper that students should get close to teachers, confide in teachers, care what their teachers think, and then, frankly, outgrow them and move on. If anything, I really have to resist the urge to tie my students more closely to me. And I couldn’t make a difference in the lives of new students if the old ones didn’t leave–there is only so much time.
A cluster of my friends from high school really have kept in touch–most everyone is still hanging out together that hung out together then. They think this makes them better, truer friends than most people–it’s a serious source of pride for them. I think it’s pathetic, because what it’s meant is that they haven’t made any new friends since then, either–there’s no time to hang out with new people, the social calendar is static. There’s something almost incestuous about they way the exact same people are still hanging out in the exact same way 15 years later–no new ideas or perspectives really ever enter into the situation, and the occasional boyfriend/girlfriend learns to adopt the folkgeist of the group or leaves shortly. I love all those people as individuals, but I moved to get away from it, frankly.
While I have some friends that I’ve kept in touch with since high school or earlier, most of my friendships have lasted a few years or so. I really can’t connect with most of the people I was friends with in high school because we’ve had such different experiences afterward. Other people move away or their lives evolve in different directions, and we fall out of touch with one another.
I’m female. I have several long lasting friendships. One is 20+ years, 3 in the 15+ range, 2 in the 8+ range. My longest friend is my best friend in the world. We met when we were 16. We see each other every week at least and vacation together as a family at least once a year.
More recenltly newer friends seems to drift through my life. We’re friends for a while, then we go our separate ways. Not because of fights or jeaousies, but because they moved, or changed hobbies or other lifestyle things.
I’m male, 50-ish, and I have both male and female friends that date back to high school. But as noted above, most of my friends in different sets don’t know each other. None of my “work” friends know my “beer” friends, who don’t know my “friends since high school” friends.
Female, 35. My friendships with other females tend to last for years, even decades, while my friendships with males tend to be more transitional. I work with men predominantly, and easily develop friendly working relationships but rarely carry those outside of the workplace. Wives and girlfriends tend to get weirded by their man being pals with a single female coworker and we wind up with lots of unnecessary drama.
Most of the males in my core group of friends are what I call friends-in-law, they’re the partners of my girlfriends. I still exchange Christmas cards and do the wedding/funeral/graduation show up for most of my guy friends from school, but my actual day to day friendships are all other women.
All my friendships date from freshman yer of college (1989) and on. My best friends have been my friends since then; one is a man and one is a woman. Used to get along better with men, but now the pendulum is swinging in the other direction and I think I have slightly more female friends.
I’m just going to use your answer, since it’s pretty much what I would’ve said.
Male, 37.
I have perhaps three people I keep in some contact with from my previous residence (where I lived for fifteen years - I moved two years ago). One is female (she was my supervising attending, then became my work colleague), two are a male couple (who I knew socially).
There are a couple of others that the partner Slip emails (so I guess the “friend-in-law” phrase applies here).
I have essentially no extended long-term friends (from high school, college, or medical school). Our lives moved in different directions (shrug).
Female, and I have both male and female friends of many years’ standing - from my block growing up, grade school, high school, work, etc. I don’t think I could say most of my friends are guys, but some of my longer-term and closer friendships are with guys, and the long-term friendships with women are with women who also have lots of long-term friendships with guys.
Sometimes it’s odd, looking back, to think of people who you were very close to at a certain period in your life, but have since completely disappeared from your life - of course, everyone has work friends or whatever that don’t survive the transition to the next stage. But for example, I stayed friends with some of my college crowd for years after college, but at this point they have all drifted away except two.
As a very general rule, the friends from high school seem to be the most enduring so far, but I’ve added a few in various places since then. In fact, just last night I went to the wedding of two friends I met through volunteering at a local nonprofit; I’ve known them each separately for maybe 4 - 5 years, but they never met each other until a potluck dinner plarty at my place a couple of years ago, after which he *begged me to hook him up with the fascinating woman he’d met in mylivingroom. Somehow I think we’ll be in touch for many years to come. 