I only had time to read the start, but the author’s friends did not prioritize and make any time for their social lives outside their kids. You see this with highschool or college students that get their first serious relationship: they completely fall off with their friend group for months or forever.
When you start a new phase of your life it can be seductive to give it all of your time and not make room for anything else. Going to college, new job, marriage, babies, etc. And if that’s what you want: great! But you owe it to the rest of your life to let them know or they’ll figure it out and grow annoyed and less likely to try to reach out.
This’ll be a problem when you eventually have the time to take a step back and realize you’ve dropped all your connections. Your friends may not want to try reconnecting with someone who had no notion of sharing any time.
Now this isn’t to say a newborn doesn’t demand all of your time: it absolutely does. But with today’s ability to connect, it’s really on you to make sure you keep occasionally connections going and you don’t flood them just with your new baby or whatever. I have a friend with a 7mo old and while they dropped off a lot, we never lost contact with them via online messaging and they made a big effort to still get together. Even if it was just coming over and having delivery. Or eventually going out to baby-friendly restaurants and having longer board game nights. It can be done, you just have to prioritize it.
I think when you’re used to clubbing or hanging out in bars it’s probably hard. By the time my friends had kids (I was the last one in our group) we had long graduated to home visits and playing boardgames (i.e. gotten old) with little or no drinking involved. Certainly it reduced the number of times we saw each other, but overall the relationship didn’t feel changed.
For my friends and I (not bar people), hangouts still changed when they had kids because now the choice is hang out at my place or hang out at theirs…with the kids. I have to “compete” for my friends’ attention until the youngins go to bed and then we have to be quieter as to not wake them up.
Yea, when I hang out with my friends that have kids it’s always just a constant stream of interruptions where they have to step away from whatever it is we’re doing and go deal with one of the children. Which I understand, kids take priority, but it’s definitely worse than before when we could just focus on having a good time. There’s also the fact that a lot of time they’ll invite me over and I don’t go because I’m already stressed from work and I don’t have it in me to deal with their children on top of it. If the kids weren’t there I’d have no problem going over.
I feel that, I don’t have kids and I’m not planning on ever having them. And most of my friends did. The dynamic obviously changed overnight and reaching out to them feels very one sided at the moment. I understand obviously, but it’s never gonna be the same. The idea of having the parents get a sitter for an evening is nice, I should try it someday.
Sounds rough. I’m in a weird opposite basket. I feel like less than half of my friend group has kids, and now we’re in our 30’s/entering 40’s so it seems it’ll stay that way.
It’s weird because, the way this article is phrased, it feels rare.
Anyway, I’m sure reaching out feels one sided for some of us. But I don’t think anyone minds it. Those reaching out want to foster the relationship, those being reached out to always welcome it.
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