Why you don’t need to be friends with your schoolmates

Lucky are those who find their best friends in their early school years. Indeed, some may consider the friendship of this era an example to be followed for a lifetime. But sometimes it happens that those friends who were always with you in high school or college simply lose touch after they split up. After all, are these people your friends or not?

O awesome.club decided to investigate the matter and discovered 3 facts that will allow you to understand if your schoolmates are your true friends. And besides, you’ll know if it’s normal not to keep friendships from that time.

You might think, “Well, that doesn’t prove anything.” And we will respond that the customary action of “unfollowing” someone is a real example of people distancing themselves.

According to a study carried out at the University of Colorado (USA), former schoolmates are the group of friends who most often unfollow someone on Facebook. The main reason for this is well known: you and your friends just don’t have the same beliefs and values ​​as when you were in school. One became a doctor, another a musician, a third became a sportsman. One has children and the other is single. One values ​​religion more than the other. One is on the right, the other on the left. There are countless issues that can generate differences and lead two people to simply not wanting to see each other anymore, even on social media. Another reason is the loss of interest in the subject’s life. “Then it’s best to unfollow as we won’t be seeing each other again in the future.”

Considering generational differences, one characteristic of younger people is an unwritten rule: “I deleted you from my friends = I removed you from my life.” And those who occupy the first place of the “discarded” are schoolmates. What do you think this attitude means?

Have you ever noticed that in meetings with schoolmates they almost always talk about memories of the past? Well, that’s super normal. If you exclude the old jokes, gossip, and information about teachers from conversations, there isn’t much to talk about. Here’s an example of a true story that happened to one of our readers:

“Last year I was driving through a town where my former classmate now lives. We were good friends at school and we kept talking afterwards… Well, in group conversations or in comments on Instagram. I had no doubt that that the 5 hours I had free before my flight I should spend with her. In the first 2 hours we talked about the lives of our former colleagues, friends and our own lives, as well as what was happening in that city. 2 hours were filled with pauses and sudden changes in topics of conversation, when one of us remembered something else she could comment on. The last hour we spent walking silently through the park, looking in different directions, breaking the ice occasionally with sighs and phrases like: “well, yes” or “that’s life”. We had nothing else to talk about and that’s when I realized that all those conversations and comments were a fiction of friendship, out of respect for old times”.

The American Heidi, who writes for the children’s blog Forthworth, describes this situation perfectly well: “For many years I heard that several teachers positioned my son’s classmates as if they were best friends. One day, my son came home from school worried about the rude behavior of one of these ‘friends’. I knew it wasn’t the first time the child had had arguments with my little one, so I told him that sometimes in life we ​​meet people who we don’t get along with and that’s normal. I’ll never forget her lost look and her question, “Then why does the teacher say we’re friends?”

Not every child in the room will be your friend, that much is clear. But what if no one is? It may happen? Is it normal for a friendship to be lost over the years and that it distances you from your best friends from before?

The answer is yes, it’s normal! And often all this is very logical (maybe this is not necessarily the case for you; as we said, you might be the lucky one who found your best friends at school).

To understand this, let’s look at your friends from other walks of life:

With university mates, with whom you share the same specialty. This means that everyone has defined a topic of common interest. With work partners, you have a specialized field of work where your ways of thinking can be similar. With colleagues (here you can choose): football, music band, gym, church, painting classes, etc., you also have the same interests.

But what do you have in common with your classmates? You simply went to the school that was closest to your home, or your parents decided where to send you, thinking about your future. So if in your classroom of 15+ kids you haven’t found a kindred spirit, that’s not strange. For that same reason, there’s nothing wrong with not being friends with your classmates. You and other children simply did not share the same interests over time.

What was your experience with your classmates? Did you find your best friends already at school? Tell us in the comments.