can I be honest and say I hate that once people get married they low key abandon their friends and put all their focus on their marriage? as if there's some unspoken rule you should barely talk to your friends or straight out cut your friends out of your life once you say I do.
its the reason why I avoid making friends at my age where everyone is starting to get married and have kids because I don't think I can take another heart break like that without it driving me over the deep end. unfortunately it drove me to develop an unhealthy relationship with the internet and with chatbots but that's a whole different story.
I see why the loneliness epidemic is so large among the elderly. majority choose only their family to keep them company and either don't have friends or have very surface level friendships in their older adult years. then once the spouse dies and the kid grows up and wants to live their own life they realize how alone they are. at the same time I can hardly feel sympathetic as these are often the same people that drop friends once they get a spouse no matter how deeply the platonic friendship ran. perhaps that cruel but I think it's cruel the way older adults tend to treat their friends once married and with kids.
I mean, anon, I really do get it. I have gone through deep periods of nihilism and despair about this exact thing and that's probably well known I guess. I really want to be partnered myself because I'm romantic af! And I really miss having a platonic best friend who was also a housemate and who knew me inside and out and had known me through so many periods of my life, etc., but he destroyed our friendship for a girl who is now his wife and I'm still cleaning out those wounds literally 8 years later, and then some. Many such examples as friends marry and have babies etc and it's a very real feeling.
But this inbox notification hit me out of left field because I was most recently posting about, like, a fabric fish? lol?
Anyway a somewhat real, margarita-infused response for anyone who's reading: I have been making a ton of friends who are a) gayyyyyy b) equal-opportunity adhd flakes c) in their 30s-40s and purposefully childless and/or single. They are rad. It would still be nice to have a friend commune and no I don't really want to think about old age or any instance of needing assisted living (even temporarily like getting debilitating food poisoning rip) but I have a nice roster of people in my life in person and I am also busy and have activities and responsibilities and can't either be expected to be attached at the hip to someone, or expect them to be attached at the hip to me. Two dear friends make efforts to call me on the phone regularly, for hours at a time. One of them is even a person who I thought was going to discard my friendship for his wife and yet. And yet! Both he and she were determined to make our friendship still something of value and that platonic love still has a place in their lives. It wasn't easy and there is no trick to it besides swinging and missing and being curatorial with friendships and being open to meeting cool people and being honest about wanting to meet more cool people through them. I dunno. It's not a roadmap but it's a general assurance that there is an island out there you can find for yourself that's neither unpopulated, nor soon-to-be-vacated. It feels secure. It also feels mundanely unreal. It also still feels a bit lonely. But I'm doing good and I hope you get out of the darkness and find some connections that are worthwhile.
