Old friendships

Spinning off the new friendships thread

“we should catch up”

“For sure, and we will, real soon”

"that's right"

“James Redd, it just doesn’t seem like you’ve explained yourself properly. How do you expect me to fill in the gaps so I can relate to you?”

Facebook has been good for these, gotta say. I'm in at least semi-regular contact with a handful of friends from elementary school and even earlier than elementary school, none of whom I've lived close to for decades. I went to one of their weddings last year — which I probably would have gone to anyway, but my sense of closeness with him is greatly amplified because we're in touch online.

What's the cutoff for "old friend" anyway? Someone you've known more than 10 years? 20? Since childhood? There are people I still think of as relatively new friends but we've actually been pals since the Obama era.

For me, this would be “people I was friends with before the age of 25” but lives are complicated, so it’s a relative thing

Since I've been married three times, I guess a natural cutoff for me is "Have you met all of my wives?"

Heh. I've met two of them, not sure where I fit in, you don't have to answer :)

lol so you have. I guess you're in the intermediate category?

i was emailed at the start of last year out of the blue by my best friend when i was like 12: we probably last saw each other at all in our late teens = a gap of some 45 years

(before i went off to college i bought a starway guitar from him which i in fact still have)

we chatted a bit and said we'd maybe phone one another but this hasn't happened yet tbh

tbh most of my friends are 'old friends' in the sense of "have known for 15 or more years". 2008 is really the line of demarcation, only about 5 people I met before that I'm still close friends with, the rest are distant memories.

FB is very weird with how easy it makes to reconnect w/ old friends who still live in town. one of my best friends from 7th grade added me years ago, and we were both into west coast hip hop at the time (and still). one day I posted that I was doing karaoke and where I was going, and he showed up. first time I'd seen him since I had braces. surprised he recognized me.

my oldest friend I met the first day of high school, 1995. I have been two all three of his weddings, was best man at the first two (he didn't do formal ceremony at the third). but even w/ us, we had a major falling out that lasted 4+ years, because while I was living with him, he kept attempting to interfere with my relationship with my then-girlfriend because he'd been divorced a year earlier and he was taking his frustration out on me. after I moved out of his place I barely talked to him for years.

he apologized without being asked to years later and now we're back to where we were prior as friends. and he's grown a lot as a person.

(by 'interfere', I mean 'actually make inappropriate flirtatious remarks to my girlfriend in front of me' and 'msging her to badmouth me behind my back')

Glad you were able to patch things up!

me too. humorously enough, he got married again last year....to one of my other high school friends, who he's known since first grade, and I met at the same time as her. we were all in high school choir together all four years, and she was my Madrigals partner.

we hung out a few weeks ago tailgating at a soccer game and thought how wild it would have seemed to us as kids that we'd all be hanging together in our 40s and that the two of them would be married.

I'm from a small town, what's really surreal is when someone you grew up with marries one of their friends' sisters, who you also grew up with

Classic: Telling funny old stories, being reminded of other old friends, filling in gaps in the historic knowledge base
Dud: Being treated as if I were exactly the same as I was decades ago, takling about stuff that might no longer be relevant but is maybe still annoying, missing the absent friends

i've lost most of my old friends over time. dropping facebook was the big one. there are a lot of people i just didn't really have the opportunity to talk to other than on facebook. i didn't like the _ways_ facebook pushed us into interacting with each other, though. ultimately i dropped it and there's a whole bunch of people i knew going back to the '90s who i haven't talked to since.

transition did majorly change my friend group. nobody was openly transphobic or anything like that, it just led to a bunch of knock-on changes that have led most of my old friend group to move on, either quietly or loudly. most of my friends who have stuck around were either queer to start with or have since come out as queer. i don't think this is a coincidence. i think cishet people are basically cool, i have a hard time getting along with or relating to their lived experience.

a lot of my old friends, i feel like i still have a lot in common with them, not just old times. even the cishet ones, we're pretty similar in a lot of ways. it's mostly just the circumstances that are different.

tbh most of my friends are 'old friends' in the sense of "have known for 15 or more years". 2008 is really the line of demarcation, only about 5 people I met before that I'm still close friends with, the rest are distant memories.

For me the cutoff between old and new is 2004, when I moved out of Dublin. Anyone I've met since then I consider a new friend. These are mostly dogwalking people, so we mostly talk about dogs, and sometimes it's good not to go too much beyond that. I might have coffee with some of them from time to time, but I wouldn't go to the cinema with them. I was in a sewing club attached to a local craft shop for a good few years, but during the pandemic it stopped and I realized I didn't miss it, so I just never went back. None of the "friends" I met there ever got in contact with me, so I guess I was right about that.

OTOH, last weekend we had old friends over who I've known since I started college in 1988, and that was excellent. And then next weekend I'll be seeing my absolute best and oldest friend, who I've known since I was 10. It really helps that I still live within an hour of Dublin, and most of my friends still live there.