Mental Cobwebs

I had a lot of acquaintances in high school, and I would call them friends, but I don't have a lot of "friendships." What I mean is, a friend that will stay in my life throughout the changes that come. In high school you make a lot of friends. I wasn't a "popular" kid, but I'd say I had at least 20 or 30 people I interacted with on a regular basis -- eating lunch with, talking with in or between classes, or meeting up with after school -- that I would certainly have called friends. The day I graduated from high school those numbers dwindled down to a mere handful.

From there, that handful started to drop as well. For awhile I'd hang out with each of them every couple weeks or so, but after a marriage and a child came along that changed. When you're married and have a baby and a friend calls you and ask you to come over and hang out, you can't really just hand the baby to the wife and say you'll be back later because you're gonna go sit around and play video games with so and so. The friendship has to evolve and both friends have to be on board with that.

I got married when I was 21 years old, so those friendships had to evolve pretty fast. Only one of them rolled with the punches. So, at 25 years old I have one friend to my name, but I am extremely thankful he's been so damn good at adapting to the new friendship we have.

He doesn't have a family yet because he finished college, but he seems to understand mine. Sometimes we meet at the local Chinese place with Emmy in tow and he has always been great with her. When I invite him to come hang out at our place I feel a little bad that I might not be as entertaining as most people our age that are spending their 20s doing whatever they please and "finding themselves." But he seems to be fine with the fact that these invitations usually end in us playing toys with Emmy.

Having that solid of a friendship is great, because my wife and I haven't really made any couple friends that we can do couple-y things with. All of her friends don't really bother trying to adjust, they've just fallen into the category that all of my high school friends are in; happy to run into each other and "catch-up" for five minutes, but not really an active friend anymore.

So while I'm extremely thankful for my one friend, I'd still like to have some couple friends who also have a kid so that we can do family type things together like going to the zoo or park or whatever. How exactly do you make those? I'll have to look into that.