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Lost old friends - how to make new ones?

2 replies

Itscurtainsforyou · 20/01/2018 19:50

We've had a really tough few years, at the moment we're generally tired so don't go out in the evenings and can't afford a babysitter (hopefully this will improve soon...). I thought we'd done ok in keeping touch with our friends despite all that's been going on (they have children the same age as ours, similar restrictions) but I've recently realised that we haven't at all.

We have different "pockets" of friends and in all cases we seem to have pretty much lost touch. I'm always the one to get in touch, never them. They frequently don't reply to my messages, they get together as a groups but don't invite us as they used to (which is their prerogative but is still hurtful) and have very much moved on as friendship groups without us.

We're feeling a bit sad about no longer having any friends! We're not sure if it's something we've done, if we've had so much emotional stuff on that we've become boring with no real topics of conversation any more, but it's upsetting that several of our groups seem to have excluded us.

We can't even go out and make new friends as life is a production line of work-sleep-repeat in the week and pretty structured in terms of kids activities at the weekend.

I think what I'm trying to ask is how do we move on from being excluded by our old friends and find new ones? We have each other but it would be nice to socialise (even just in the day with the kids) with other people!

OP posts:

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GlitterUnicornsAndAllThatJazz · 20/01/2018 19:52

I think for a start you need to stop seeing yourself as a "we" sso much. That really stood out to me in your post.

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Itscurtainsforyou · 20/01/2018 20:01

I've used "we" as the friends we've lost are joint friends, people we got together with as a family. Also I've used "we" as we've both found ourselves in similar situations with our friends.

My OH has some friends independent of me and I have some independent of him but they're either old friends that we don't see as much as they live all over the country, or "early stages" friends who we've not known long.

We're certainly not joined together at the hip, but we try to do family stuff at the weekends. We used to do family stuff with these other friends, but as they're disappearing it would be nice to find other friends we can see in a similar way.