Growing Up

When most people are young and in school we promise each other that we will be great friends forever. Then "life" happens and somehow years later we find that we no longer associate with any of the same people we used to know. What happens to cause this?  To really understand that, you need to understand what it is that drew you together in the first place.

You are naturally drawn toward people that have the same interests as you. You like a lot of the same foods, so you tend to eat together. You like the same styles of music so you jam together with your tunes, either in a band on your stereo or both. You play the same games, watch the same movies and read many of the same books.

The more things you do together, the more you have in common. And the more you have in common, the more you want to do together. You play, live, love, learn and grow together. Over time your experiences together form what seems to be an unbreakable bond.  After awhile, you really can not imagine living without one another.It is usually what happens though.

A couple of people in your group may go off to college in different states. One person may have to go out of town to take care of family. Another may spend 16 hours a day trying to keep a family business running. Soon there is just one or two of you left, reminiscing about what you all used to do together in the old days.

All of the things that you do together and all of the people that do them together become your social circle. I think of each collection of activities and time spent together as the core of a sphere and each person as rotating around that sphere. There are an infinite number of potential spheres as there is an infinite number of potential groupings of people and activities. And the way I see it, when one or more people no longer spend the time in that group doing those activities together, they naturally spin off from that sphere and into another one.

It is technically possible to hold a group together that is physically no longer able to spend as much time together. You can call, write, text,email, video chat, share every little thing you do on Facebook and Twitter and make frequent visits  to one another. But it will never be the same as when you all used to hang out together because there are so many other things going on in each individual life that you do not have the time to share with everybody all the time. Most people say that they will do whatever it takes to keep the relationship going but when it comes right down to doing it, they do not. And that is okay. Yes, it is possible, but generally not worth the time or effort and usually just ends up adding enormous amounts of stress and strain on these relationships.

The time and effort that gets spent trying to keep a person locked into an old social circle prevents you from enjoying the people new and old that are in your social circle and prevents that person from fully enjoying the new sphere that they have spun off into. Do everything you can to spend as much time as possible enjoying life with the people in your sphere. But when circumstances natural or otherwise cause someone to no longer fit in your group, wish them well and let them go. It is nobody's fault. There is nothing wrong with you or them. Sometimes these things just happen. It may seem sad or even unfair at the time, but sometimes room needs to be made for new growth. Not everyone grows at the same time, same rate or even in the same direction, even if we have exactly the same experiences.

And that is why people very seldom remain lifelong friends with their school buddies.