When was the last time you made a new friend?

[MrsK]

I have made two people who I would consider real, honest-to-goodness, they-could-see-you-at-your-worst, you-could-ditch-plans-with-them-if-your-husband-got-a-night-free-at-the-last-minute-and-they-wouldn't-be-pissed type of friends since moving here five years ago. Both are at work. I have made lots of friendly acquaintances/casual friends. Real friends are very hard to make as adults. My closest friend (aside from DH!) is still my college roommate.

Incidentally, all friends don't have to be these kinds of friends. I'd say that most people can count these types of friends on one hand and, really, that's all you need. You don't have to be BFF's to just hang out with someone socially. Most of your social network will be more casual, situational friends and you'll have different friends for different circumstances. My closest friends are probably my husband, my brother, my college roommates, and a couple that I've known since law school. And those are relationships that evolve over decades. It's not realistic to expect that level of commitment from people with whom you are newly acquainted.

[Vishenka69]

Last time I made a very good friend was med school. Our current circle of friends is 99% from college and med school. We do have a social circle of DH's co-workers here but I wouldn't necessarily call them close friends. We're all transplants and same age, so we hang out together but I don't feel comfortable sharing anything personal with them or asking for favors.

I find that being first generation immigrants and growing up in NYC makes us very different from locals, so it's been harder to make friends here. I do meet up with other moms once in a while but aside from discussing our kids, I don't have much in common with them. I saw a group of of new moms who are also NY/NJ transplants on meetup but their meeting place is about 40 minutes away and I wasn't sure if I wanted that kind of a schlepp, but now I'm thinking of signing up and giving it a try.

[v-girl]

Surprisingly, a few of my closer friends came from online -- one from a BabyCenter message board for March '07 mommies, the rest from my suburb's message board. There's one family from our suburb's message board that we are still close with -- it's been 8 or 9 years. We've been through potty-training, a toddler with cancer, pregnancies, depression, etc. And even though they've moved quite a ways away (25-30 miles), we still get together because our kids get along great, our husbands are good buddies, and we just pick up where we left off when we see each other.

The rest of my/our good friends have come from church. Some from when our girls were in preschool, the rest from his & hers retreats we attended last year. There is a family we met from my retreat who I don't know how we went so long without knowing each other. We have family dates -- we each have 3 kids who are close in age. We love it!