My wife and I began dating during high school after our freshman year. My parents set a rule for me (a good rule) that I was not allowed to date anyone until we were 16 years old. Yeah we “officially” started dating when I was 15, but I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere with her during the summer after our freshman year. We didn’t really start dating until I turned 16 in August of 2011.
I used to think that the rule that I couldn’t date until I was 16 was a dumb rule, but looking back it was good. By the time I was 16 I was almost old enough to drive. At 16 years and 9 months I was able to drive by myself, which allowed me to go spend time with my then girlfriend without my agents dropping me off. My parents still did a fair amount of dropping me off halfway to her house and her dad picking me up so that I didn’t have to drive the 25 minutes to her parents’ house.
There were a few different vibes I got from my “then” friends that are worth mentioning. Some of them are negative, some positive, but most of them are the reason that we lost touch over the years. I will continue to reiterate this idea but, am I upset about losing those friendships? No. Looking at our life situation in its current state, we do not live anywhere near our home town and most them do not either. We all have our own lives and there are different things in this world for us. We are sent on different paths after high school or college, which also breaks down these relationships.
You deserve better.
This was fairly common from my “then” friends that were female. It’s a subjective phrase that is based of their morals or values, but mine are different. Most of my friends at the time did not want to date me (that I knew of), but they also didn’t want me to date someone that they felt wasn’t up to my level from their perspective. I’m sure from their perspective they thought that they were doing what they thought was right trying to warn me of something terrible to come. I was confident, and still am, that they did not like my wife for petty reasons, and they thought that she was a bad person. Obviously, I didn’t care what they told me as it is my life. I know more about my wife than they knew about her, which makes a big difference. I decided to venture past my friends’ opinions of someone and get to know my future wife and it was a great decision. As you might be able to guess, I do not have any of these female friends today. This isn’t just because of my dating my wife, but our other influences in life. I went to a different college than them. I live in a different state than most of them.
At this point I lost about 5 of my closer 10-12 friends. Was I upset about this? No. I wouldn’t trade my decisions for anything or go back in time to change them. The people that I figured were closest to me turned out to not be the most supportive. God has a plan in our lives, and sometimes it may hurt or not be what we think it needs to be.
The Silent Treatment.
This is probably more of a guy thing than a girl thing. When I started dating my future wife I was abandoned by some of my closest guy friends. One possible reason for this is they wanted to date her. Another possible reason is that the friends that I had hung out with the girls that did not like her. So, those girls dictated who the guys were inviting to parties or to hang out. I would guess that I had somewhere between 5-7 closer friends at this point, and lost all but 2 of them. The one that remained is the type of person that I could trust in and rely on. The rest of my friend group didn’t align with what I was working for in life, and that’s ok! We don’t have to keep the same friends for our entire life, and we don’t have to agree with everything that they say or do.
Going to college.
My wife and I attended the same undergraduate university, which made it much easier to date. I went down a different path than my high school friends. Most of them attended other state schools or private schools that were distant from me. Some of them went into the military or moved across the country. This created a divide in our relationships that left me with 0 high school friends that were close. I still feel like I have 2 distant friends that I can still contact if I have something come up.
From my time in college I gained 1 friend that I feel I can contact anytime with questions. That being said, we do not live near each other which can make things difficult.
My main takeaways.
Don’t worry about how many friends you have right now, think about the quality of those relationships. So if I add up all my close friends during my time that I was dating, I would say I have 1. I started with somewhere around 10-12 and have landed at 1. This is not a sad story or a low number to me. I have always been a fan of quality over quantity. We can not properly maintain close relationships with large quantities of people, especially if those people do not have the same interests at heart. We can do our best to please others, but in the end, we have to find what makes us happy and fulfilled in life. The number will always change while we find closer connections.
Choose what is best for you, not for them. It would be nice if we had the same opinions as our friends, but that is not always possible. There are times that our friends are right. They have their own set of experiences and have learned from them. We should take that into consideration when they are offering opinions to us. I urge you to investigate what they are telling you. It may or may not sway your opinion, but it is good to listen to outside voices.
Try to maintain relationships that you want to keep. After I graduated from college my wife and I moved here to Ohio, which is far from my classmates. By “maintain” I don’t mean that you need to chase after past relationships, but build good ones with the people around you. This may mean that you used to have a relationship with them or have for a long time, but it doesn’t have to.
I wrote this because I feel that it is hard to maintain friendships at the different stages of life in American society. We are all going separate ways quickly in our high paced culture. We leave high school to attend different universities and colleges, and have a hard time finding people we can relate to that who will be there long term. My solution to this has been to make friends where I am, supporting and encouraging them in hopes that they will support and encourage me. As we come to a closing of medical school in about a 1.5 years, I know that we may not see any of the other students again. Knowing that you will be separated and will most likely not see your friends again is hard, but that doesn’t mean that you completely lose contact. To me it means that it can be harder, but it’s more meaningful to leave a quality lasting impression on a few people than just a glimpse of who we are on a lot of people.