The vast majority of my friends circle are all pretty much the same age (within a year or so) and there are no single people left. I like being social and enjoy the company of others (most of the time) and go out whenever we can. My wife and I live about 2 hours out of the city and the vast majority of the friends circle live within the city limits, so we are always the ones that drive and have a good night.
But over the last 3 or 4 years this has been happening less and less. The invites are not as frequent as they once were and I think I may have put my finger on the cause of this. Firstly there will always be times when people can’t catch up and it’s a decent size group of friends, so coordination can often be an issue, but I digress.
Children. Yes those little balls of seemingly boundless energy. We have none, (don’t want any) and we are in the vast minority on this one. They all have at least one and are all pretty close in age too, they span from 8 years to 8 weeks. This is not generally a problem but our lives are becoming more and more separated from them all. We love kids, we are constantly surrounded by our family and all the nieces and nephews and I love being the awesome uncle that builds Lego and watches cartoons. I have also played a factor in the early memory of their children’s lives as I used to be a professional children and newborn photographer and they all have pictures from me and my wife is fantastic with kids.
I just can’t help escaping the feeling that we are somehow being ostracised from everyone who has children. Compared to them all I will admit, I am an alternative thinker. I like gatherings but am generally a quiet person (I also have bad hearing so I tend to miss things) but I find it ever increasingly difficult to engage in conversation with the other males as the relatable topics start to dwindle. It was always kind of a struggle with them all being corporate people and me being the artist. Also I can’t stand football and they all love it, so another avenue of typical conversation between men who are in the same room because of their wives, goes begging. I do love motorsports, but they are not very interested in that. Add the never ending stories about their children and the colour, size and duration of their excrement has my desire to be very drunk skyrocketing. Don’t get me wrong, they are all good blokes and great fathers, I just struggle to be interesting when they have such a different world to me.
We have a wedding in two weeks and I just don’t think I will have much to talk about, despite doing plenty since our last group encounter. I feel I will be spending much of the evening noodling my head in blind agreement and sipping vast quantities of adult beverages and offering little in the way of riveting conversation. I might be doomed. I can talk about my cat, he is fucking awesome.
Have any of you had the same experiences as lives and worlds change or could I just be overthinking the whole thing.
