All my friends are taller than me, but I’m 5’1, so I suppose it’s to be expected.
I can’t think of anything that every single one of my friends have in common, except for the fact that they all like drinking. Not in excess (at least, not all the time), but enough to get pleasantly drunk while we’re all hanging out.
All of my Asian friends have birthdays in May or June, except for one whose is in early July. My friends of other races have a normal distribution of birthdays as far as I can tell.
Most of my friends are classical musicians, but I’m a music major and don’t have much contact with people outside the department, so that isn’t very odd.
Now that I’m at the end of my child-bearing years, it occurred to me that all of my closest women friends, like myself, never had children. Most of these women I knew from my early 20’s through my now-late-40’s so it’s not like I chose them because they had no children. Any one of us could have had children during that time but for a variety of reasons, none of us did.
My crowd, too. It’s also interesting that none of us drink much, except the musicians (I’m one of those).
Public service. I run around with a group of ten guys that I’ve been friends with since junior high (I’m 35 now).
We’ve got:
Two cops (one sheriff, one highway patrol),
one firefighter,
one paramedic,
one physician’s assistant in a public health clinic,
and
two public school teachers.
Not a bad record for a bunch of drunken idiots. But it does leave me and my two friends who work in a box factory in last place when it come to gauging our societal worth!
Almost all my friends are liberal, and probably because most of them I know through work, travel a lot. There is a pretty heavy geek gene in the pool.
Yep. I noticed the same thing about me a while ago. I am an oldest child and my wife is also. It goes far deeper than that however. If I start liking someone at say work, I will eventually ask and those people are almost always oldest children. All of my friends growing up and all of my girlfriends for that matter were oldest children. Birth order studies in psychology have suggested that birth order does matter to some degree for personality.
I’m such a word geek that I have my very own copy the 1989 20 volume edition of the OED at home. (But I still need to get the supplements.) I am trying to figure out how I can get the 10 volume first edition. (published 1884-1928) I’m not sure how much interest I have in the third online edition …
As for a trait all my friends have in common – for my long term friends, it’s that they all are willing to be accepting and not too judgemental of others, can disagree without being disagreeable, that sort of mindset.
My newest friends are all into molten glass. 
I seem to attract women friends who have major drama going on in their lives. Most of the time I like helping people put their lives back together, but sometimes the drama just drains my spirit. It’s hard being the “rock” all of the time.
Yes, this is my experience, too, most of my friends and all of my boyfriends have been oldests or onlys, going back to childhood. My husband is actually a youngest, but he has only one sibling, who is nearly 10 years older than he is, so it was really very much like being an only. He displays a lot of only tendencies, I think.
It took me a little bit to find something in common between my friends, but I think I’ve figured it out. They’re all imaginary.
What my friends and I have in common is mainly love of the same kinds of music. We’re all extremely good with words, and we have the same kind of sarcastic, often caustic sense of humor. We don’t drink, but we all smoke. We’re very good at what we do - so much so that we’ve each parlayed it into a career. We’re each baffled by the kind of bureaucracy we have to work under, and take solace in the fact that we aren’t like the Stepford People we have to deal with daily. We each know a lot of people, but we’re our only close friends.
Every one of them studies/knows at least one language beyond English, usually two, and a few three or more. The languages range from Spanish to Swedish, and everyone constantly goes on about how they want to learn more. We switch between our languages when we’re together, just because we can. (I once counted six languages being used in one conversation before.) It’s ridiculously nerdy.
Admittedly, almost all of us are language majors, so it isn’t *too *odd… but it sure is to most outsiders.
Since the “curious” one has been taken…
All of my friends love food. While some are vegetarian, or keep kosher, or have allergies, every last one of my friends talks about food and would go with you to a new restaurant.
All of my friends are extremely high functioning borderline alcoholics. Some own their own businesses, some are high end computer support, some are chefs (Great googly-moogly, who are the Chefs). And we have very competitive natures, but in a friendly way.
90% of my friends in Santa Fe play rugby or are dating/married to a player. The only people my age that I work with play also. I’m going to school via distance ed, so I don’t really meet anybody that way. However, I’m involved with rugby at least 10 hours a week, so it only seems natural that that’s the case. We all like to go out, and basically like the same types of non-rugby activities, so it tends to work out well.
This thread was sort in the back of my mind this weekend and I had pretty much decided that, since most of my friends are from different age groups, ethic backgrounds, family situations, etc., I wouldn’t have anything to contribute to this thread.
Then it hit me. As superficial as it might sound, almost all of my good friends have great smiles.
I guess this could be considered a superficial thing but I also seem to remember some study where it was found that we chose our friends partly due to their attractiveness. But, it’s not that these friends are all “attractive” overall, but they do have great smiles.
I’m wondering if they become my friends because I respond to that (straight, white teeth) and the fact that their smiles have a great, genuine warmth about them. I like geniune, down-to-earth people and perhaps the open and warm nature of their smiles helps me figure something about their nature.
So maybe what I’m saying is the thing my good friends have in common are warm, genuine, open personalities.
All of my closest friends (the IRL type, anyway) are all readers, particularly fantasy/sf. Pure coincidence, I think, but telling, none-the-less.
It seems to have died down, but once the common thread in our friendships seemed to be that they were getting divorced and the male half of the couple was dropping out of our lives completely. It happened at least 5 times in the space of about 2 years.
It’s easier to list what characteristics all my friends lack. I don’t have needy friends, friends with baggage, neurotic friends. I don’t have friends who I have to “be there” for.
I pick up on it early, and I don’t abide it. Let’s hang when we’re in a good mood, and if you got shit to work out, do it on someone else’s dime.
But other than that. . .they’re all over the spectrum. . .some clean-livin’, some drinky/smokey friends, some peaceniks, some in the military, some who read, some meatheads who just like sports, some married w/ kids, some who are single for life, some older, some younger, some nerds, some hippies, some grouches, different ethnicities, some broke, some well-off.