27 year old here; why do we tend to lose friends as we age?
In 2021, I lost a couple of boys I’ve known and hung out with since high school. One friend tried to get with my ex and lied and said he hooked up with her, and just constantly felt the need to disrespect me, the other friend left me across the country while I was in the bathroom and our plane left to go back home from vacation. As a man, I’m too old to tolerate behaviors like these from anyone.
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As you get older, with more responsibilities, it gets harder to maintain existing friendships, as well as getting harder to make new friends.
When you’re in high school, you’re forced to hang out with your peers, in a relatively casual environment, until you end up making friends with some of them. Same thing in college.
Life gets more busy for everyone with kids and family….
groups need to be called together. school does that naturally and does that for you. you have there 30 people from who you can choose friends.
Out of school you need to be actively looking for friends and appointments/events/hangouts with them .
Well, you answered your own question in part: those guys turned out not to be that good friends after all.
While most people won’t have such dramatic experiences, your circle of friends usually shrinks when you grow older. The explanation is a combination of little opportunity to make new friends, and little available time to maintain or cultivate existing friendships.
There are many people I would have liked to stay in touch with – but many of them moved away, we all have busy schedules, kids and marriages come into play with new family obligations, we got busy jobs etc.
When you were young, you were much more inclined to put in some effort to maintain friendships, even overlooking some downsides for the sake of simply having friends in the first place; now, you don’t need those friendships as much anymore, and you simply can’t be bothered.
A major reason is often the realisation that you have drastically different values.
I fell out with my oldest friend when we were both 27 (almost 20 years ago now) when a series of events made me realise he essentially saw people as objects which could be used and discarded.
None of us is perfect, but (just as in a marriage) people need to share a surprisingly serious set of values in order to stay in each others’ lives. I’ve seen this happen again and again between “lifelong pals” who slowly grow apart or have a sudden and painful separation. It’s nearly always about values. In my case the number-one value is always loyalty- something that was drummed into me in a large Irish family since day one…I’ll put up with almost any crap out there but disloyalty is the death of a friendship, even a very old one.
Everyone has their own line in the sand I suppose.
It’s initially hard to make the break, but sometimes it just has to happen. In all honesty, the things you describe do not remotely sound like friendship as I understand the term.
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We don’t lose friends, we lose acquaintances who only appeared to be friends.
I stop reaching out to people that don’t reciprocate some effort. I’ve lost a couple this way.
Because everyone grows up, gets married, starts a family and than they forget about you.🤷🏻♂️
In HS you were likely same-place/same-time friends. You all needed someone to hang out with and the peace was kept. Now that’s over and so is the general loyalty.
Most friends are circumstantial – school, college, work. In my experience there’s no such thing as real friendship
1. Fewer opportunities to meet new friends, not enough time to really get to know people.
2. The older you get, the less need for new friends. Life is fuller.
3. At some point, most people seem to be just annoying.
Different types of relationships have different cycles, but all relationships have a life cycle. This is natural, and normal.
You can get books about it. A class on “interpersonal relationships” is usually an entry-level, course, part of the required curriculum at university. I feel like it’s pretty well understood, so you can get a ton of information, if you like, about how friendships and other relationships typically work.
Anyway, life long friendships are rare. It’s natural that those relationships reach the end of their life cycle at some point, and I think it’s typical that some of the longest-lived of them from our formative years end in our mid-20s.
You’ll make more friends, and those will likely have a cycle as well. I feel like learning more about this sort of thing is important, so you don’t feel like you keep losing people and it’s somehow abnormal. I think you’ll feel better for it, and be better able to navigate these relationships.
people tend to want to hang out with people at the same phase of life as them. In school and university, everyone is more or less doing the same thing. but once you hit your mid 20s or so, things like marriage and kids happen, and couples only want to hang out ith other couples and dads only want to hang out with other dads.