Adult friends

My point about being interested in hearing from people without kids is simply that I understand having kids would add an extra level of difficulty to scheduling and priorities that doesn't factor in for me.      I am interested in hearing, in particular, from people with lifestyles that are more similar to mine. 

Yeah, same here. My husband is four years older than me and he was the last one out of his close group of friends to get married. So his friends now have children in high school, college, even graduating college while we still need to find babysitters. Their kids often are our babysitters!

My closest long time girl friends don't live around here but we get together once a year for a girls weekend. I had a lot of close friends when I was teaching full time but we've moved and so have they. The other friends I've made in the last 5 years or so are my training friends. Our long rides on the weekends are also our social time.

Going out as couples - seriously we have probably only done that 5 times in the last year. We really need to get out more!

Part of the problem is we have a lot of family functions - birthdays, holidays, baptisms etc that eat up our weekends. We have 12 nieces and nephews ranging from 9 months to 22 years old. If we're not running around to that stuff on the weekends then we are perfectly happy just to be at home.

Woops missed that! We were married without kids for 8 years but it was not that different. I had friends invite me to go out on Friday nights when I was teaching but I always wanted to go run or hike. I always thought how strange I was to pass up time with friends for time alone in the woods! And we still had the same issue running around to family stuff all the time.

Sometimes I am amazed that my friends from HS and I are still friends, what with all the changes in our lives. We see each other on rare occasion, but it is always enjoyable when we do get together.

I have found that now that the kids are out of the house that we have to "make time" for friends and such, or we will simply go home and be alone with one another. We now make it a point to stop and see friends every Friday afternoon, oddly enough for Happy Hour  Also, I am cultivating friendships with the group I ride with on Saturdays. And The Wife is starting to get together with a new neighbor for Sat morning walks. I think it is a good thing that you are being proactive on this. I also think that relationships are really important and make life so much more worth living, so I hope you are able to get out and find more people to spend time with. I also think that as we get older, it is a bit harder to meet people, although I'm not sure why that is.

Good Luck.

Okay, I feel a lot better now!  I am really grateful that I have a husband who is interested in hanging out with me and we do have a great time together.  I think I am also feeling some pressure after taking care of an elderly parent and thinking about who will be interested in hanging out with me when I'm old   My husband is quite a bit older so I am going to continue with my plan to cultivate strong relationships with my nieces   I also think it's worth pursuing new friends when the opportunity arises and I actually had a fun get together with an acquaintance who reached out, and I am grateful for that too.

Totally! I was also wondering about that, because it happens to me a lot.  My mom was just wondering about this, too, so I don't think it's strange.  People are just different.  I have a high school girlfriend who now lives about 2 miles away (we moved from a town about 70 miles away to go to college in the city).  She is always REALLY happy to meet up, so it feels worth doing despite the hit on the self esteem

I wish everyone on BT lived in the same town - think of the fun we'd have

I have made some GREAT friends on BT and still enjoy it when we can get together for a bike ride or run.  In fact, I have expanded my friend pool by a lot due to my BT buddies.  That ebbs and flows, though, and even that feels like it's gotten more difficult with age. 

 I might be kind of this way, very slow to come around to inviting someone to do something with me. Part of that is being guarded due to getting burned in friendships where I figured out the hard way people were not who I thought they were. So now, as I'm into my 40's, I just don't want to deal with all that nonsense and drama so I don't get involved. For a year now I have wanted to invite a couple of my training friends, their spouses and kids over for dinner and to hang out but I can't bring myself to do it.

Then I married and moved to NV. I have found it very hard to make new circles of friends. My husband does not really support having people over, and is really slow to warm to people. Reno has been better than Winnemucca.

I'm 41, with a boyfriend of 10 years and no kids. 

Yes it is hard to make and maintain friendships with people as you get older. Scheduling with ANYONE is a huge factor. I have to make myself reach out to my friends  to meet for dinner and/or the movies. Mind you, I don't even ask my friends with kids if they want to meet for dinner or the movies. It will never happen. 

I'm outgoing and I like to meet people to do things, but even I find myself wrapped up in all my activities. I'm just really busy and don't have a lot of free time. My other challenge the older I get the less my friends have in common with me, in some respects. They are getting "old", and I'm still very active. 

I will say I have tried to make new friends. I was working on a friendship with a gal who I thought was pretty cool and we had some things in common. Then I had a house party this month, the first one her and her boyfriend attended, and apparently she was using the "N" word around my friends. Afterwards I sent her an email letting her know I'm not racist and neither are my friends, and she got really ticked off, and un-friended me. *Shrug* 

Yes its hard.  I have to interact with people all day and by the time my work day is done I just want to be left alone honestly.  Its funny because i have been thinking about this looking at my facebook page that I have clusters of friends from various sections of my life so its interesting to see the mix as my tri life andy ortho life don't really intersect.  Its takes a lot of effort to maintain those freindsships and some are worht it and some fall by the wayside. I am busy enough I rarely make the effort to try and connect with some one to SBR because quite franly my schedule doesn't allow an extra hour to wait on someone else to get wherever we are meeting or to wait for someone to be available to do something.

I'm 36, single, no kids and my friends and I get together regularly and do all sorts of fun and sometimes stupid stuff.  IMO, technology has made it even easier to do that.  Fun new restaurant opens, FB invite to go have drinks and food.  Heck today I just set up a cruiser bike Christmas light ride with bar stops with my close friends.  I should add that these friends come from all different households too, married, kids, no kids, single, etc.  

This post kind of hits home for me. I'm 33 (married for 14 years, no kids). I've been thinking about this a lot lately ... as in a mini-meltdown teary moment this week. We moved 21 hours from my home town a year and a half ago and I've not managed to make even a little bit of progress towards making friends here. I do live in a very small town (<3k people) which probably contributes to that, but I'm not actually that busy and would drive to meet-up for something fun. Before, I only had a couple friends and we didn't even see each other often, but it at least it was regularly.

I know mid-30's isn't exactly "old", but growing older in isolation is a little scary. I even considered responding to a radio ad needing volunteers to hang out with elderly people and help them with shopping etc.(except it would probably be to help me more than them), then for some reason this seemed really odd and I never applied.

I don't even consider someone with school-aged kids a prospect as they always seem to have so many family obligations, but maybe I need to be more open-minded. People with kids probably need friends too .

I know I surely could somehow make more of an effort, but it's almost like I don't know how to make friends anymore.