I graduated from our equivalent of High School in 2003. I am still friends with several. Might not see them for months or even years but when we meet its great.
Me too. I’m still close to my college roommate, but I’ve lost touch with everyone else. High school? I’m no longer in touch with anybody. We all just drifted apart in our 20s.
My experience is that people who stay in contact with high school buddies face-to-face IRL (I work with many people like this, btw) are people who aren’t particularly mobile. Townies, for lack of a better term. They stay in the area where they grew up. They might or might not have gone to college. They get married in the same area, have kids in the same area, die in the same area.
OTOH I have online friends who’ve reconnected with high school/college classmates just by being on a reunion committee.
I think one reason why I never particularly wanted to remain in contact with most of mine is because that period of my life was tumultuous. I don’t ever want to be reminded of who I was at that time and I don’t need anyone to remind me who I was during that time (it’s probably worse in my mind than actuality, but there you go).
I had a few fairly close friends in high school, but not all that many. Then I left home at 19 and never lived in that city again, except for a couple of years in my late 20s. Even now, I’m about 2 hours away from where I grew up.
I’ve got 3 FB friends who graduated with me, and I’ve only seen one of them in the last couple of years. But when we get together, there’s not a lot in common, since our lives have been so different. There are a few folks I’d like to see again, just to find out where life took them.
My youngest sister, on the other hand, has remained best friends with a girl she knew from kindergarten on. They meet up regularly with several high school friends - and they’re all in their 50s.
Normal is what’s normal for you.
After high school everyone I knew and I all went in different directions. But I know several people still in close contact with high school friends. As others have noted geographical distance changed things, but these days the world is much smaller. I see my kids keeping in touch on Facebook with their high school classmates and even their childhood friends in New York that we left when they were under 10 years old.
My high school class just had our 40th reunion, and it is obvious from the Facebook feeds that many of us are still close friends with each other…meeting up for vacation visits, taking trips together, being married to each other. My closest group of friends (since seventh grade!) are still in contact on a regular basis, with four of us still living fairly locally and getting together or calling or messaging very frequently. Among the outer tier of friends, we are mostly Facebook friends, but we are posting and responding daily to each other, even if it is only a like or a birthday wish. None of these people are my only friends, and we certainly don’t live in each other’s pockets anymore, but I’ve known some of them since kindergarten and I’m sure we will always consider each other friends and care about what we are up to.
Friends are friends, I think it all depends on how close you are and how your lives change over time. My closest friend is someone I met in high school and we’ve stayed in touch over the years, with some gaps, but we still catch up and seek each other’s advice and hang out when he’s in town and all that sort of stuff. And all of this is despite us taking very different paths with our lives. However, other than him, I’ve essentially not kept up with any of the rest of them, there’s a few I see from time to time when we might happen to cross paths, but that’s rare. Many have facebook friended me, but only a couple have I even messaged. But that’s because, again, we were never terribly close and our lives diverged.
The thing is, a lot of people still have significant changing and/or growing up to do after they leave high school. You could even be really close friends, but even going to separate colleges, and moreso if one of you does and another pursues am immediate career, joins the military, etc. you just end up with very different experiences and social circles.
I’ve even had similar experiences from previous jobs, or where people left previous jobs. We would hang out a decent amount while working together, but when they leave, some I’ve kept in contact with, others not, though it’s been more predictable as I’ve gotten older since I think I’ve changed less personality-wise.
On the other hand, from what I’ve seen when random posts of old high school classmates do come up, many of them still have similar circles of friends. I’ll see a picture from some party and see several people that were in the same clique in high school tagged in it. But I’m unsure how typical that is, since it seems to me that the type of people that would have those same circles of friends would be the same ones that would reach out and friend me on facebook despite us not having talked in many years. Whereas those who’ve only kept a few friends or essentially completely cut ties probably wouldn’t be sending me friend invites.
I guess in short, it seems to me that it’s probably common to maintain some friends, it’s probably uncommon to have none or to keep essentially the same circle for years after.
I think it’s weird if someone’s only group of friends in adulthood is their same group of friends from high school. That seems like never cutting the cord- one step from living at their parents’ house well into middle age.
That said, I don’t think it’s weird if someone is close to a friend or two they’ve known since then or even earlier.
I mean, one of my best friends is a guy I met in 7th grade, and several others are people I met in college. And there’s a pretty thriving bunch of us from high school who interact on Facebook as well, mostly because we all live in different cities.
I only keep in touch with one friend from high school. He used to live in the Bay Area so I would sometimes stay with him on business trips back to the States. We wouldn’t see each other for a few years, but then we would get together and within a few minutes be talking like brothers.
I moved over to Japan in the pre-internet days and I never kept in touch with any friends from college. He’s pretty much the last of my friends from my youth.
A few years back when I was on facebook, I looked up a bunch of people from high school and friended them, but we never really connected so I just dropped them after a while.
My wife has two close friends from elementary school! They went to different high schools and universities but remained good friends. They all stayed local, in Taipei, during those years so that made a difference.