<p>My closest friends oddly enough all live in other cities/states. They are friends from college mostly, and CC, but my oldest friend I have known since kindergarten. Mostly we communicate by email and with my friend from kindergarten I wrote of our struggle last year when my FIL suffered and died from Lewy Body disease (parkinson’s like dementia). Sadly, my friend made a rare phone call last week to tell me her mother had just been diagnosed with Lewy Body disease, and she said that when the doctor told her all she could think was that I was the only person she’d ever heard mention this illness, and but for me she would have been in total shock at the doctor’s pronouncement. We spent a good hour on the phone together. Even if years go by, one phone call wipes them away.</p>
<p>I’m not a parent, but do you think social networking sites will make it easier to preserve friendships? Of course they’ve only been in the running for several years so we can’t say what their long-term effect will be …</p>
<p>I think just e-mail in general (I’m not a facebook or myspace person) definitely helps to keep in touch. I e-mail with a friend from boarding school days daily and also with a friend from pre-k. I wouldn’t pick up the phone nearly as much but on e-mail we’re back and forth with snippets about family life, politics or whatever. Same goes for keeping in touch with my sister who for many years has lived in Latin America. Sometimes we even Skype!</p>
<p>The thing about “needy” is that it can mean so many things: it can mean would you watch my kids; it can mean listen to me brag about my kids; it can mean help me think through this personal problem with trying to fix me; it can mean I’m moving this weekend, can I borrow your pick-up truck; it can mean hey girlfriend, put on those dancing shoes I need a friend to help me paint the town red tonight…</p>
<p>Some of those needs I would be good at filling, some I wouldn’t. One person’s “needy” is another person’s best buddy.</p>
<p>Personally, good friend material to me is someone who is capable of summarizing the thesis of the last interesting book they read, and capable of adding their own (original) thoughts. Also I like adventurous people. My friends get me to do new stuff I never thought I would try, and show me a new side of life.</p>
<p>I feel like I don’t really have any ‘close’ friends, and that makes me kind of sad. My mother has lunch once a month with a group of people who graduated from her high school. My mother-in-law meets up with college buddies. I have little or no contact with anyone from my high school or college days. My two best friends in high school both lost a parent recently, and I saw them briefly at the funerals, but we don’t really keep in touch. Same with college. I go to the reunions and I have a blast, and I promise to keep in better touch, and then I don’t. </p>
<p>My ‘current’ friends are definitely people I know through my kids. We socialize a bit and all, but only one of them is someone that I feel I could really totally ‘be myself’ with. The others are more in the context of ‘close acquaintance’ if that makes any sense.</p>
<p>I keep hoping that in a few more years, when my kids are all off in college, I’ll have more time and can pursue those old friendships - I really do miss them.</p>
<p>And my husband is the same way. He plays fantasy football with a group of guys he’s known for 30+ years, and they get together once a year for the draft and then keep in touch a bit through email, but we never seem to connect or go to dinner or anything like that. I guess people are just busy. It’s a shame.</p>
<p>"Same goes for keeping in touch with my sister who for many years has lived in Latin America. "</p>
<p>We do this too, only amongst cousins. My family is scattered between the Netherlands and Hawaii and all points in between. My cousin who currently lives in the Netherlands used to live in Venezuela, and before that in Russia. The one in Hawaii used to live in Japan. Email, esplly group email (“reply all”) is like a virtual family reunion on a weekly basis.</p>
<p>Jude -</p>
<p>Your life sounds a lot like mine. My mom has a group of friends who’ve been getting together on a monthly basis for 50 years now. But they have always lived in the same town and never moved away after finishing school. I wonder if our generation’s mobility has something to do with it.</p>
<p>I also find that after you’re out in the world, it’s the college/hs friends who stick around for eons. In between there are the work friends, and then being friends/friendly with the other parents at your kids school, but those relationships seem to fade if you change jobs or your kids graduate. Might just be me, tho’.</p>