Friendship spread

[mrsukyankee]

What kind of spread of ages are your friends?  I went on a girls' weekend and I was the oldest by 5 years, with the youngest being 16 years younger than me. I definitely felt it in my ability to 'hang' after drinking. My closest friend is 15 years younger and my oldest friend is a few years older than me. 

[laterz]

I'm the 2nd oldest. I think the oldest is 5 years older, and the youngest is 17 years younger. I've never been a party girl, and luckily they all know that and still love me anyway.

[sakoro]

I have a core group of friends from college/ high school who are around 1-2 years of my age.

As I’ve gotten older, I’m making the effort to connect with people outside my age group. I was born in 1978 which was a trough in births before the millennial generation started a few years later, so there are simply fewer of us Oregon Trail/ Xennials. Also people in their mid-40s are very pre-occupied with career, kids, aging parents, maintaining a big house in the suburbs, health issues or don’t have the bandwidth to start new friendships for other reasons.

I’ve enjoyed meeting Millennials/ Gen Z folks through networking groups and meetups and one of my closer local friends is 5 years younger. I find that they are much more open to new tech (e.g. they will try out chatGPT rather than disparage or fear it), have good intelligence about future trends. That generation is far less likely to tolerate poor working conditions and (in many cases) less apologetic / timid about their political progressivism than my age cohort.

I also have a close friend from grad school who is about 15 years older. She is one of those people who have friendships from many different age groups. I’ve learned a lot about what to expect as I age and as she has progressed in her career.

Having multigenerational interactions/ connections was much more common in prior generations when communities were smaller and people lived close to extended family. I think it’s a real loss to society and to ourselves when we don’t interact with younger/ older people.

[momin2013]

Honestly, I don’t have many friends. My work friend-friend is 2 years older and we just get together occasionally for lunch. I also have a neighbour friend-friend who’s about 10 years younger and we just get together as a family with hers. I can’t remember the last time I “went out with friends”.