Nobody is asking about your other friends who are so diverse they make Benetton weep. If you had to pick one BFF, how close is that person to you, demographically?
My best friend since 8th grade is extremely close to me. We’re a couple weeks apart in age, white American, Democrat, never married, each have one kid with a black dude (different black dudes, and several years apart), both are middle children with a slightly older sister and a much younger sibling, BA degrees, jobs we’re overqualified for…
Like everyone I know’s closest friend is pretty similar to them. Who is an exception?
My BFF and I have been bffs since we were teenagers. I have 5(or6) kids and she has 4. 3 of each of our kids are the same age. She was with her husband for 20 years before she married him and I married mine after we dated for 6 months. Both of us have been with our spouses for more than 20 years.
She is super fertile 4 kids as well as a surrogate multiple times. 10 years between bio kids for me and blessed by adoption several times in between.
I am a Christian and she is an atheist.
I guess we are more similar than different.
I have a few who I would consider my best friends, but I would say that, yeah, all-in-all, you seem to have a really good point.
My best friends from high school were all straight guys (I’m gay, but didn’t really realize / act on my sexuality until college). We still keep in touch and I hear about their wives and whatnot, but yeah, pretty much all Caucasian males.
Nowadays, my best friends are gay, but one is Latino, albeit he “acts white” (his term, not mine). I would say that I feel I’m somewhat smarter than them, but when you’re going out, having brunch and whatnot, there are other things to talk about than world events and intellectual matters.
I’m excluding my wife because I think romantic interest in a person can skew things a bit.
My best friend and I are fairly different. He’s a few years older, white, has lived all over the world, has a sibling and has two kids. I’m black, I’ve lived in one metropolis my whole life and have barely left the country, I am an only child, and I have no kids. Oh, and I guess he barely pays attention to sports, which is a pretty significant part of my life.
On the similar side, we both work in the legal field (which is how we met) after having started our working lives in different industries. We share similar political views and tastes in food. And senses of humor, of course.
We’re about the same age (met in college) and both college-educated white females. Our husbands are in the same field, although they do different work. We both have an older brother, and both of our parents are still married (to their original spouse). She lives in a small town in a rural area in a southern state on a farm that’s also her family business; I work in our nations largest city at a desk job for the government. She has kids, I don’t. She owns a home, I don’t. I have a graduate degree, she doesn’t. We’re of different religions, but nether of us practice.
I’ve known my best friend since we were in third grade. After we graduated High School, we gradually drifted apart.
Unfortunately I had a hard time accepting this. For ten years I tried to maintain the type friendship I had in grade school. I don’t know if its nostalgia, loneliness or what, but I put up with a lot of bullshit because I thought we were still close friends.
We are still buddies, but I’ve finally come to accept that we are not the same friends we were in school. We talk maybe a couple times a month. My wife can’t stand his wife (and in hindsight, I regret introducing them for various reasons ).
A hard part of ‘growing up’ I’ve had to do is accepting that no matter how ‘close’ to someone you might be at one point in your life, you might naturally grow apart. Maybe you move far away from each other, drift into opposing ideologies, something. I gave myself a lot of grief trying to preserve something with him that didn’t exist for the better part of a decade. Nowadays, my wife is my new ‘best’ friend, because even though she doesn’t share the same nerdy intrests as I do, she is patient, commited, and likes to hang out with me.
Yeah, very similar to me in most ways. Same overall demographic cohort. Very similar religious, political, moral, and aesthetic views. We very rarely surprise each other. We’re the kind of friends who reassure each other.
In the past 10 years i have made a new class of friends that I feel would do anything for me and me for them. My friends from the first 50 years or so of my life seem to lack in character and have violated my trust in them.
Even though my new frieds seem to come from very different backgrounds than myself we do share an imagination and love for creative energy that carries into our mutual respect for one another.
Me: white college educated mother of six. Married, deist, dog person. Currently a full-time wife and mom, previously worked in news, radio, and the hospitality industry.
Her: Biracial high school dropout, no kids, married. Pagan, cat person, taxi driver. Previous jobs include roofing, bartending, dancing nekkid.
We met on Halloween 1987, had our ups and downs through the years, but our friendship has survived everything thus far, and I love her and consider her my other sister.
Hmm. He’s a guy, I’m a gal. We’re both white. He’s one year older. He’s worked an endless string of retail jobs, while I’ve steadily advanced in my career. He has a GED, I have a Bachelor’s. He has diagnosed psychological disorders, I do not. Our spiritual views are similar. Our political views are similar. We share major hobbies. Our brand of humor is not the same - I am serious, he is a joker. I prefer cats, he prefers dogs. I am married, he is single. I have older brothers, he is an only child. Our morals are the same.
We are sort of seen as two halves of a whole. I create, he destroys.
My best friend and I share the following similarities:
Both women
Both single
Both own cats
Both Caucasian (she’s mostly Czech; I’m a bit German)
Both college graduates
Both creative
Both have the same astrology sign
Both have similar political views
However:
She has a large, extended family that she cares very much about. I have my mother and my somewhat-estranged brother.
She enjoys traveling (she’s been to Europe at least once). I prefer to be close to home.
Despite her parents divorcing when she was little, her father remained a figure in her life. My parents also divorced when I was young. I had no further contact with my father until 40 years later.
She has abilities in a variety of areas - English, history, math, science. My abilities are mainly in English and the social sciences.
She grew up in Nebraska. I grew up in California and Hawaii before coming to Nebraska.
Her mother is extremely well-educated. Mine didn’t graduate high school, and worked as a nurse’s aide and in a laundry while I was growing up.
Still, we manage to understand each other, more often than not.
We met on our first day of high school, so aged 11. I am just about a month older than her. Grew up in Manchester, both moved away as adults, both retain a hopelessly romantic view of our home city but have no intention of moving back there. Both married with two children. Both married to non-English men. We have the same sense of humour, broadly the same interests, overlapping taste in music, books, film. We both come from comically stable and happy childhoods, our single siblings share the same name although hers is older, mine younger.
Biggest potential difference is she’s Jewish, I’m not. In actual fact she’s never been a very competent Jew and since she was the first I ever met I was fascinated as a child with a religion and a history I couldn’t share. Consequently, I was the one who kept track of the festivals and observances she could never remember. We both abandoned religion in our teens, so that’s another thing we share. We started out in similar professional areas, although we’ve both drifted off. We both returned to study in our early 40s.
The biggest difference these days is geographic - she’s in the UK, I’ve started the slow process of settling on the other side of the world. I see her in about 5 days time, which is very exciting.
I genuinely see her as family, just a part of my life in a way that my brother is. We’re not demonstrably nice to one another, sometimes people overhearing us think we’re positively rude to one another. She’s just there, in my heart, my head and my life. I can no more imagine my life without her in it than I can my brother.
Similarities: We’re both white, female, the same age, unmarried, university students (though she’s a grad student and I’m still an undergrad because I switched courses halfway through), from roughly the same socioeconomic background.
Differences: She uses a wheelchair and I don’t, she’s trans and I’m cis, she’s straight and I’m bi, she’s single and I’m in a relationship, she’s an atheist and I’m a Christian, her field is the physical sciences and mine is healthcare, she’s the youngest child in her family and I’m the oldest in mine.
We’re both politically liberal white Southern Americans of predominately Italian heritage.
I’m 32; she’s 26
I’m male; she’s female
I’m single; she’s married
I have no kids; she has two
I’m an atheist; she is a pantheist
I’m mostly straight; she’s mostly not
I work retail; she’s a freelance writer
I was raised Christian; she was raised Jewish
I am melancholic and phlegmatic; she is sanguine and choleric.
I’m the next youngest of four; she has too many siblings to remember
I come from a working class background; she comes from a middle class background
I get along with my family, though I’m not too close to them; she doesn’t really get along with hers
As for me, yeah, mostly the same except education level and marital status. Most of my friends are 10 years or so younger, but the person I’d consider my best friend is very close to my age and that makes somewhat of a difference at times. Not a huge deal, but growing up in the 60s was a different experience than growing up in the 70s/80s.
There is/was romantic and sexual interest on my behalf, but it’s not a secret and I’ve never acted on it despite a couple opportunities. I’m also good friends with her wife.
My best friend is not quite three months younger than I am. We met in college. He was in the ROTC program and I was a hippie, but we bonded over music…like me, he plays guitar, and we started a band. He and I still get together with the other guys in the band twice a year to record and jam, and those occasions are the most fun I will have in any given year (the latest one comes up in less than two weeks!).
I was an only child, he has two sisters. He’s been married once, but it has been and remains a rocky relationship. I’ve been married twice; the first, awful…the second, good. He has one son with whom he’s very close, as do I…though I also have two wonderful stepdaughters.
Following several years in the Air Force, he went on to become a commercial airline pilot and make tons of money (out of his airline’s 12,000+ pilots, fewer than 100 are senior to him), whereas my income has always been modest.
Despite his military background, his political views are liberal, and very much in line with mine. Same with his views on religion, which if anything are even more skeptical than my own.
He has a great fascination for how things work; I’m mechanically inept. He is very extroverted; by the time the meal at the restaurant is over, he’ll be best buddies with the waitperson. (They all give their names now when they first appear, but my friend is the only one I’ve ever seen who gives his name back to them!) I’m not introverted by any means, but I could never rise to his level. But it’s absolutely genuine on his part, not put-on at all.
He lives two states away, so I’m only certain of seeing him twice a year, though occasionally more. I just spoke with him on the phone last night…it’s always a happy occasion.
Hmmm. My best friend and I have had many similar things happen to us all our lives. It’s almost like we are traveling parallel roads. We’ve been friends for about 25 years.
Anyway, similarities -
Both work for small county government in similar fields (different counties).
Both live in the Mountains of Colorado (different towns).
Both grew up in rural communities in Illinois (we did not meet until moving to Colorado)
We share the same political views.
Same age/race.
Neither of us have children.
Both love small venue live music. That’s typically what we do together.
She’s basically my beer drinking bud.
Differences –
Friend is a divorced woman, I’m a married man.
She leans towards vegetarian. I defiantly don’t.
While not religious, she is sort of spiritual/mystic. I’m pretty well grounded. She has said that I help ground her.
She’s very outgoing, while I tend to be a little bit reserved.
She gets very involved in local politics, I really don’t (see above).
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