on social circle

Have you ever thought on how much your social circle has changed, say, during the past 15 years?

I had this thought yesterday.

I have more or less 4 people whom i consider my core friends. All of them are male. One of them I met in highschool, two of them we grew up together with (one of whom I have long lost touch with but i still consider him one of my best friends). The last one is my cousin.

I have a lot more people whom I consider friends, good friends. A couple we met through the department at university. A lot more I met during my 5 and a half years in AIESEC. Don't ask me to express why I don't consider these people my "best friends", there's no real argument for that, but all of these people could be my best friends if we had the opportunity to spend more time together.

Is time the real factor? Or distance?
No.

But we just didn't have any of the two enough to get closer and say reach "a higher level" as stupid as this might sound. At some point in time we did have it though, when we worked together, when we lived together, when we spent time together. This one-look-is-all-it-takes communication, this knowing when one is down and when to help out when not, being able to laugh with each other's joke (hard to do with mine, i have to pay a compliment to all of you out there for doing so :-), being there at the good and bad times.

Then I have a few potential friends out of the army. People we spend time together because we have to, but also because we choose so, as we see some matching opportunity (after all each of us has the choice not to socialise with anyone at all, though it's like being insane). Really cool people, from different backgrounds and with different interests.

My total number of people in regular communication, meaning frequent in saying so, is no more than 10 or a bit more. They don't necessarily match with my closest friends. I don't know how to distinguish the closest friends within all the friends around, but one conclusion is that my social circle has changed a lot in the past 15 years, from school, to university, to AIESEC, to the army. And it keeps expanding instead of shrinking, in contrast with a lot of people I know in GR who stick with the same people for a lifetime.

I am willing to value good friends as they value me in life, but having them as my only company for a lifetime is a choice I can't make. I need new contacts, new perspectives, the excitement of meeting new people and them meeting me run in my veins.

I think my next level of making new friends after the army is my new job and my new country. Damn, i am looking forward to that!