No, I wouldn’t. But so what? I don’t like my dad, and I didn’t much like my mother. But I loved her and love him. Love is not a more intense version of like.
No.
My in-laws are awesome, though.
I know it’s not. That’s why I asked.
My dad, sure. To an outside observer, our relationship already resembles friendship far more than parent/child (greatly aided by the fact that he looks and acts 20 years younger than he is)…we play games, watch sports, go roller-coastering in the summer, shoot pool, drink, and just generally hang out and shoot the shit or talk about life. That’s certainly not to say that he’s not “really” my dad; he always will be, and in times of trouble I’d knock on his door without a second thought. He just recognizes that I’m an adult now, so his parental role can take a backseat to having fun with each other.
My mother, while I love her, has never really recognized this, and it shows in the way we get along. I can’t really be sure whether I’d like her as a friend or not, because I’ve never seen even a glimpse of how she’d treat me if I were just a fellow human being…and given the way she and my grandmother react to one another, I strongly suspect that I never will. The closest I can come is to note that I have very little in common with her current male friends, outside of a general irreverence for social acceptability and a tendency to be a smartass. Would that be enough to make us friends? I honestly can’t say.
I probably would not.
My dad, may he rest in piece, was a gregarious, hard-not-to-get-along with kind of a guy to most people. I have a hard time getting along with people like that. 
But beyond that, he was also a deeply racist, and that’s a deal-breaker for me.
My mom is a real sports fan. She knows more about baseball than I ever will, and most other popular-in-the-U.S. sports as well. She goes to church every week and sings in the choir. That shit would bore me senseless.
You know, I actually thought about this quite a bit after my mom’s passing.
She lived such a full and wild life, even before she was 24, and in comparison my 24 years on this earth so far have seemed quite dull.
She was the homecoming queen, and apparently Ms. Popularity at school. I get the impression that, had we grown up together as peers as opposed to me being her son, that I probably wouldn’t have been cool enough to hang out with her in high school. It’s kind of an odd thought.
Makes me wonder what her impression was of my social life. I assume she probably thought I had more going on for myself than I actually did and was simply keeping it private. I would like to think she was unaware of what a horrible dweeb I was during high school and college.
My dad, yes. He’s funny, easy-going, and intensely caring. He sometimes bottles up his emotions but it’s all good.
My mom on the other hand… while I love her and she is a great person, I’d never want to be her friend. She’s a worrywart, a sad sack, and borderline racist. I’m sure she’s different around people that aren’t me, me being an only child with no first cousins, but in my experience I’d run far far away.
Interesting question. Both of my parents could be very aggravating people, but still likeable. My husband immediately took to them, too.
There are a couple of goofy things about them that might have turned me off them, though.
I respect my Dad’s intelligence. He is an authoritative source on a lot of things, particularly middle eastern and central Asian politics and history. But as a person I find him unbearably smug and condescending. Also he enabled my mom’s mental illness, which was hell on me and my sister.
No. My parents are pretty obnoxious, and while I love them, I don’t particularly like being around them too much.
My in-laws, on the other hand, are fantastic.
Let’s just say I wouldn’t likely socialize with them if they weren’t my parents. They are very conservative, and we have very little in common. This bothered me quite a lot when I was younger. I wanted to be liked for myself, and I knew they wouldn’t like me if I weren’t their kid. I’m pretty much over it now. They are who they are, and I just try to concentrate on the qualities in them that I do admire.
No. My Dad, Mom, and Stepdad I see mostly out of family obligation. My Mom and Dad separated before I was 1, and if I didn’t know they had sex because of my own existence, I wouldn’t believe anyone who told me they had dated, let alone married. My (half) brother I hang out with socially, as well as a few of my aunts / uncles so it’s possible that we would be friends if we knew each other outside of relatedness.
If I were just meeting my folks, I’d probably like them, but wouldn’t likely go out of my way to get to know them better. We just don’t have that much in common anymore.
No. My father was a mean-spirited, negative, racist, homophobic bigot, and my mother isn’t much better… Come to think of it, so is my brother…
Haven’t talked to any of them in years. If any of them weren’t family and I met them, I’d want nothing to do with them.
Then again, since I’m an openly Gay man, they wouldn’t talk to me anyway…
Oh, absolutely. They’re not “cool” parents exactly; even now we don’t drink alcohol together at all, or anything like that. When I go visit them, though, it’s non-stop Simpsons quotes all around. In fact, we’re a lot like the Simpsons, except my dad’s like the polar opposite of Homer.
I would’ve answered differently when I was a kid, but I was a rotten teenager, and I don’t know how they could’ve prevented that.
I’ve heard it said you should be a parent, not a friend. I think you can be both. While a child and adolescent, my parents were my parents, and I respected them as such, but I always felt their love. As I grew into adulthood, they became more like friends. They somehow engineered this transition perfectly. They set me straight when I needed to be set straight, but we’ve partied together too. I can think of no other people I would rather have as parents. I wish everyone had parents as great as mine. My dad is dead, but he even prepared me for that. I don’t know how, but he had a calming influence and an easygoing and humorous approach to his own death that made it easier to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, we miss him, but for my part, I have no regrets.
Hmm. Honestly, there was nothing particularly wrong with my parents. They were overall kind and hard working, and treated their kids and others around them reasonably well. OTOH they were both, relatively speaking, ‘soft’ bigots, and my father, frankly, kind of withdrew into himself and was very hard to engage in his later years. I have a hard time imagining ever hanging out with them were they not in fact my parents, but would put that down mostly to not having much in the way of similar personal interests.
My dad - absolutely. He was just always a good guy to be around.
Mom? Tougher. She’s a very conservative, very Catholic not all that dynamic kind of a person. Love her to death, but if she was a stranger I probably never would have bothered trying to get to know her,
Yes. Especially my dad, who is interested in everything and really fun to talk to.
Less so mom, but I still think I’d be friends with her if she lived nearby. She’s really good for certain things, like shopping, when you’re in the mood for them. And every so often she comes up with something really profound or so sensible that it hits you like a brick.
I also really wish my stepfather were still alive. He was the nicest guy, and we shared a few interests. I wish he were still around to answer cooking questions and try out recipes on, among other things.
My mother and I are extremely similar, so if in some parallel universe where we were still ourselves but weren’t related we’d probably get on very well even with the age gap. That said we do have quite different outlooks on some topics, so I don’t think we’d be best friends or anything. My dad - absolutely not. He’s about as far away from me personality wise as you can get. We don’t get on particularly and I decided a while ago to give up on him, and haven’t spoken to him since.