Are you still friends with any/many of those that you were in secondary school with?

red_red_wine

I have less than five days left in secondary school and quite frankly, I'm distraught.

I love my school. I love it for its atmosphere, I love it for the teachers and for my subjects, but most importantly, I love it for the fact that I'm surrounded by wonderful people.

Yet, I'm mindful of the fact that while next week, we will all be pledging to remain friends forever, in reality, I will probably lose contact with many of those that I spend time with at present.

It seems that while there are at least twenty people I feel I know very well and with whom I can have great craic, there are at most two people with whom I have a friendship that I think will be strong enough to survive the difficulties that different colleges etc. will pose.

It makes me sad to think that while I have spent six years with a group of girls that I have great respect for, many of those friendships will fizzle out.

Am I being overly pessimistic? I hope so I realise that friendships evolve and that you will be friends with different people at different stages of your life...but I hate the idea of forming friendships only to have them disintegrate when geography etc interferes.

guitarzero

I didnt stay in touch with any of my mates as I didnt really like them bar a very short few. It depends on a lot of different things but I'd say location will be the biggest factor. Then the mingling off with other college folks etc. If youz live in the same county/city then there aint no reason to lose touch.

Daisies

For the first 2 years of college I remained friends with the group of girls from school. Than as my college work got more intense and I didn't get home as often I found myself being phased out. I didn't hear about nights out, when I came home no-one was "able" to meet up and then when I left to go travelling, not one of them even text me to say goodbye. The one girl I stayed close to (who I now live with in Oz) has started bitching about me to those girls who we lost contact with.

But to contrast this, two girls I went to college with are still part of a group of 10 really close girls from primary and secondary school.

So I think it really depends on you and your friends. I gave up making an effort after a year of no-one else bothering.

Kojak

I haven't seen many of my seconday school colleges since the day I got my LC results. TBH, I have no intention of trying to get in contact with them ever again. There was too many clicques (sp?) in my year in school and after a while you'd just get f*cked up of people hanging out together just because they were afraid to look different from the masses.

I think there is a re-union coming up next year - suffice it to say I am not going to turn up...

Lia_lia

No. But then again when I was in secondary school most of my friends were a lot older than me. Or else fellas that went to the boys school. I'm still close friends with one girl from secondary school...but I went to primary school with her too soooo..

watna

Yes, they're still my best friends. I'm 27, getting married next year and two of them are my bridemaids

Also, I've lived abroad for the last three years and they are still in Dublin - and I still call them my best friends! Sometimes you have to work at it. The girls are very good about making time to have weekends away or do girls dinners all together (I always get invited even though I can't come). It takes more effort than when we saw each other every day.

I also loved school, happiest days of my life - I still see and hear from quite a few people I went to school with whereas I'm only friends with one person I went to college with (but we are close friends). It depends on the person and the friends, tbh.

sam34

none at all, but then again I didn't have many friends at school.... I was a bit if an outcast because I didn't play sports, I was fat, I didn't wear designer clobber, I wasn't allowed socialise and I studied very hard. if I saw a class photo now I probably couldn't name many from it. the only girl I have recognised recently was one who used ruthlessly mock me because my PE gear came from dunnes while hers was branded... ironically enough she's now working on the tills in dunnes and I'm earning about 8 times what she is. but I digress.... back to the op, my friends are those I met in college and through work.

Das Kitty

Of the 6 girls in my leaving very class I'm still close to 5 of them.

x Purple Pawprints x

I'm still in touch with all 3 of my best friends from secondary school. Actually one of them I've known since I was 5 years old. I'm still in touch with a few others on Facebook and I see them when I'm out and about sometimes and I'll say hello and ask how they are etc.

Maple

Out of the girls I went to school with I would still count three of them as my best friends. We keep in regular contact by phone, email and despite all living in different countries see one another when best we can. One of the girls still lives in Ireland and I see her all the time. It doesn't matter how much time passes for us, we all just slot back into the group naturally when we're together. It's actually really heartwarming.

Two of them dropped by the wayside because of life. We'd still arrange Christmas meet-ups with the other three tho. We might not be best friends still and know the minutae of one another's lives but there's still a lot of goodwill there and we have great catch-ups.

Friendships like anything take work, a lot of times good will and intentions are there but you just need to be the one to organise the meet-ups etc.

BengaLover

none at all really, and i thought my life would end if i didnt see my friends!
im 38 now and one or two have found me thru facebook, but dont have contact with anyone else, we all drifted apart..
friendships DO evolve and dissipate over time, its only human nature and people change due to circumstance, age, maturity, etc and you will be surprised in a few years when you look back.

My 2 best friends are from secondary yeah, the rest are college etc.

rainbow kirby

I deliberately broke all contact with people in my year after school. Didn't really like my year group at all and I wanted a fresh start at college.

ellieh1

My best friend is the girl I sat beside on the first day of Secondary School. We have been friends for the last 22 years or so and have been bridesmaids for each other and godmothers to each others children . I would be totaly lost without her. I am in contact with a few others that I went to secondary school but not near to the extent that I am with my best friend.

Giselle

sam34 wrote: »

none at all, but then again I didn't have many friends at school.... I was a bit if an outcast because I didn't play sports, I was fat, I didn't wear designer clobber, I wasn't allowed socialise and I studied very hard. if I saw a class photo now I probably couldn't name many from it. the only girl I have recognised recently was one who used ruthlessly mock me because my PE gear came from dunnes while hers was branded... ironically enough she's now working on the tills in dunnes and I'm earning about 8 times what she is. but I digress.... back to the op, my friends are those I met in college and through work.

That has got to be really gratifiying. Well done btw.

I'm in touch with one girl. I was mocked for being swotty and shy, and she was the only other swotty shy girl in the class so we were drawn together.

Both of us have achieved a level of success in our fields that none of our former classmates seen to have attained.

baby and crumble

I had a group of about 10 friends, male and female, that I called my true friends in school. I lost contact with 3 of the girls pretty fast after going to college, but the rest remain my best mates. Until they all started emigrating (:mad:) I'd see them every week or every month for a cinema trip or something, still talk to most of them once a week through skype, etc. I boarded though, so the girls in particular that I still are friends with, we lived tether for 6 years, they became like sisters to me, really, and the lads just ended up as brothers... the girls who i've lost track of were day pupils.

Looking back, the people who I still call friends are actually people who i could (and have) not spoken to or meetup with for months at a time, and once we see each other again it's like no time has passed...

I dont think we ever made like, a pact about always being friends, it was just kind of assumed we'd still be talking to each other all the time...

squeakyduck

I don't keep in contact with many from secondary school. I am friends with many on facebook but I never chat away to them. I rarely text/talk/facebook the ones I am on good terms with unless they are coming up to Dublin for the day and I will try and meet up or I send a birthday message.

Out of my year of about 50 I would talk to about 6-7 maximum. The odd text and that.

Joonaspp

Definitely yes, though it hasn't been a long time.

My school mostly consisted of friendly people.

Asphyxia

I've only stayed in contact with two people really all the rest I wouldn't really talk to anymore.

KittyeeTrix

I would've stayed friends with old schoolmates but unfortunately left secondary school in 1991 (the days before mobile phones and facebook etc) so a lot of us lost touch:(

KyussBishop

Didn't keep in contact with anyone from school, no; due to issues I had back then (general discomfort around people, making socializing difficult), added with grief I was getting from some, just being there was quite difficult.

stargazer 68

Well Im 42 and still socialise with a group from secondary school. Those I dont see regularly I chat to on FB. We are currently organising our 25th reunion and have had a great response so far.

Voodoo_rasher

tho' i don't keep up to date with them, having left the area. most from elementary before that, the rest i'm friendly with seldom if ever meet. The others i don't care that they're out of my life. Don't feel nostalgic about that time in any way as the hi school was run down and a gulag. Not intending to attend any reunion as everyone would revert to the old alliances probably and i think my outlooks and attitudes have evolved so much so that i would have little in common with them now. Besides nobody bar 2 or 3 wud take my side when i got hassled..

Ickle Magoo

We chat occasionally on facebook or msn and I get invites to the odd meet up but my core circle of friends would not include anyone I went to school with...

cocokay

i think its lovely you are so happy in school, i wish it had been that way for me! i am only in contact with 3 ppl, 1 i stayed friends with, she was gay and the girls were total BITCHES to her and 2 others i ended up working with later on. we hadn't seen each other for about 6 years in between. we don't see each other a lot but would consider them mates. i was bullied horribly in school and when i left wanted nothing to do with any of them, there were a lot of skanks there. strangely enough though my best friend now was actually at my school but in the year below me! we never met in school but worked together about 6 yrs ago and clicked and have been bezzies ever since.
having said that i know a few people who have been best friends since school and i am 32 now so if you put the effort in i'm sure your friendships will stand the test of time

spurious

Still very friendly with my best mate from school. Others I see occasionally when I go to the area I grew up in.

Our class year (we left 1980) meet every ten years and we get a very good turnout each time. There's no one who didn't really get on and anyway we're way too old to bother about it now even if there was.

allandanyways

I've been friends with my best friend since the second day of first year, we fell out for a year when I got a boyfriend and she couldn't handle my attention being split onto something other than her, but we've since reconciled and are closer than ever, albeit it's a more adult friendship after not spending a year living in each others pockets.

I was bullied horrendously by my other "friends" so we don't talk anymore, one of the girls recently facebooked me and apologised for letting it go on as long as it did but it's not like we'll ever be friends.

I think you can be lucky and make friends for life in secondary school, but college was where I met my real friends because I had the freedom to be myself.

starlit

Only still friends with a few from secondary school, not that many have I stayed in contact with. Have stayed in contact more with college friends though. Majority of them are life long friends at least!

borderlinemeath

fluffyorganic1 wrote: »

I would've stayed friends with old schoolmates but unfortunately left secondary school in 1991 (the days before mobile phones and facebook etc) so a lot of us lost touch:(

I left in 1991 as well, no contact with any of my classmates until about a year ago one of them put a class photo on facebook and it snowballed from there.
About two thirds of the class are now in contact and looking forward to our 20year reunion in a month or so:).

kiwi123

ah to be honest i've stayed in contact with who I wanted to and contact with those i haven't want to has stopped. I find with some of the girls they are still wrapped up in the same dramas they had in secondary school. Not necessarily the exact same but the same fights etc only with different people and they just rehash what has happened in the past- stuff that happened 4 years ago now for me....


where has the time gone?!

Noo

Not friends with anyone from school anymore, if i see old classmates of course i'll be friendly because most of them were lovely. My group of friends were all from the same area and we all ended up going to the same college (different courses), for first 6 months or so of college we went on our nights out every few weekends and went to college nights out together and everything was as it always had been, then one evening i text one of the girls to go out, she text back saying she was on holiday for a week, i was like ah yeah grand, she always went there with her family so i though nothing of it.

A few days later the photos appear on bebo (bebo was all the rage back then) and turns out they all had gone away and never told me, gutted does not describe it. I was never really invited out with them after that, i got invites to a few of their 21sts when the time came but i felt too awkward to go, they were all still best friends. Now there was a few of them who i never really liked so i didnt miss out there but 3 of them were my really close friends for years and i never saw it coming. To this day i dont know what happened or whether i had done something.

MiniSquish

I'm friends with a few from Secondary School but we're not in constant contact but I'm still best friends with 3 of the girls I went to Primary school with and we're all 22 now.

mollybird

i'm finished school now 13 years and have kept in contact in person with mainly 2 people. the girl ive known since we were about 4 and my best mate who i met on the first day of secondary. ill be polite and chat with people i meet on the street and am friends with some of them on facebook but my best mate is the only friend ive ever stayed really friends with and i don't seem to be getting rid of her anytime soon since i'm her middle child's godmother:D

LegacyUser

im still friends with my group from school but mainly me and my three best friends who were in my class from first year. i live with one of them whom i went to primary school with. the four us wer so close and even closer now that we lost the beautiful b to cancer at the start of october. she was only 25 life sucks sometimes. now the three of us are even closer we have all these happy memories with her and at her funeral it was pretty evident how much she meant to us and what we meant to her. so the answer is yes you can stay friends with those you went to school with. they know you the best you have shared such good times. there are those who you did go to school with and you wer close once but life moves on and people change. no matter where you are you will make dear friends in the future and those from your past:)

micayla

red_red_wine wrote: »

I have less than five days left in secondary school and quite frankly, I'm distraught.

I love my school. I love it for its atmosphere, I love it for the teachers and for my subjects, but most importantly, I love it for the fact that I'm surrounded by wonderful people.

Yet, I'm mindful of the fact that while next week, we will all be pledging to remain friends forever, in reality, I will probably lose contact with many of those that I spend time with at present.

It seems that while there are at least twenty people I feel I know very well and with whom I can have great craic, there are at most two people with whom I have a friendship that I think will be strong enough to survive the difficulties that different colleges etc. will pose.

It makes me sad to think that while I have spent six years with a group of girls that I have great respect for, many of those friendships will fizzle out.

Am I being overly pessimistic? I hope so I realise that friendships evolve and that you will be friends with different people at different stages of your life...but I hate the idea of forming friendships only to have them disintegrate when geography etc interferes.

My advice, once your exams finish make the best of your summer with your school mates. No one knows where they'll be for definite in September and some of ye may end up in the same college. I went to a college far from home and where none of my classmates attended so I did lose contact with most of them. We have reconnected somewhat through facebook but we won't be friends like were in school. The first few weeks of college will be tough if you don't already know people there but there are hundreds of people in your situation who will feel the same way and you will make new friends. Try not to look on it too negatively:)

Dudess

I left school 15 years ago - even though I hung out with loads of girls at school, I'm now only good friends with two people I went to school with (and one of them I would have been friends with anyway as we're friends since we were young kids). I just drifted from the others, but it wasn't upsetting - it's just the order of things. You make other friends and you change. I stayed friends with some of them for about two years after school all right, but after that, people just ended up taking different paths. Because of Facebook though, I've gotten in touch with a few other schoolfriends and have met up with two or three of them occasionally.

Have to say, in my experience, school wasn't the place for making long-term friends - that happened through college, work, socialising, etc. School was for friends at the time, but not afterwards (bar one person who's a close friend - and again, she is from the same place as me so I could have become friends with her anyway; we were amazed we didn't already know each other when we met in first year of school).

Don't worry OP - I remember feeling so sad when I left school too. Now I'm wondering what I was so upset about! :pac:
At the same time though: you MAY end up remaining friends with plenty of them - I'm only talking about my experience.

mollybird wrote: »

have kept in contact in person with mainly 2 people. the girl ive known since we were about 4 and my best mate who i met on the first day of secondary.

Haha, pretty much snap!

Pigwidgeon

There's one person who I was inseparable from in school but I rarely talk to her any more, she became completely engrossed in her relationship and has pretty much cut off contact with all of us. Ironically in sixth year I said to my boyfriend "I'll be friends with x and y probably in 10 years but I bet I won't be friends with z this time next year". Turns out I was right.

My other best friends I've drifted from, we're not as close because we're all doing different things, but we still know we're there for each other and meet up every 6 weeks or so and it's like nothing has changed. Bar 1 who I've been friends with since we were 3 and lives around the corner from me.

But then, I've become really good friends with a few people who I wasn't that great friends with in school.

I'm really happy with the group of friends I have at the moment.

Aishae

im still friends with my childhood best mate - from the age of 3. shes not my best mate now. school changed things but were still friends. we dont meet up much but we see each other around.
i sometimes chat to 2/3 girls from secondary school on facebook. but most i wouldnt want to. weve all moved on. you grow into new friendships and they change and develop as you age. its no bad thing. if you work at it youll hold onto the ones that really matter.

Twee.

Yes And lots of people are surprised! "You know XYZ since SCHOOL?!"

There was about 11 of us in the group, four of us now are best friends, and another 4 I see at least once a month, and chat to regularly over text and Facebook. There were a few lost long the way though, of course!

solerina

I have stayed in contact with 5 people from secondary school, it used to be more but as the years have gone by there are less and less that Im in contact with, thats just the way life goes, people get married, have kids, life changes....You stay in contact with the people that matter so dont worry OP all will be well !!!

Rubberlegs

I left school 21 yrs ago next month (:eek:), and am not in contact with anyone I went to school with anymore. The odd time I'll see a girl from school and say hi but that's it really. I am friends with several of them on Facebook, but it feels a bit fake. TBH, I'm not a big fan of Facebook anyway and rarely log in. We did have a 10 year reunion, and it was nice to catch up all the same. I think it's lovely any of ye that have friends since early childhood, or secondary even, I'd love that:)

Abi

I'm out of school 14 years now, and in contact with two. One of which I only got in contact with recently because we bumped into each other in college. I suppose I lost touch with school friends when I left, life can take you all in different directions. If I'm brutally honest, I wouldn't be really interested in seeing any of the others now.

tomissex

I'm still friends with 3 of my friends from primary school and their mums are my mum's friends so we all see eachother regularly. My 7 closest friends from secondary school are still my closest friends, we went to different colleges but we live quite close to eachother which helps! Things might change when we start to move away from home and start families etc but I'll still always have time for them.
My mum is still friends with her friends from secondary school, she's 51 now!:eek:

I think if you want to stay friends and make the effort it'll work out! Enjoy your last few days in school, take mad photos that'll make you smile when you look back at them, enjoy your summer and face the future when it gets here

Stheno

not one, my best friend for ten years through school and college I met a year ago, we said hello and swapped chit chat but had nothing in common.

Twas kinda sad in a way

TaraFoxglove

Stheno wrote: »

not one, my best friend for ten years through school and college I met a year ago, we said hello and swapped chit chat but had nothing in common.

Twas kinda sad in a way

What happened after college that it didn't survive?

magztar

I got straight out of my town the minute i finished and I am better off for it!!

LadyMayBelle

I went to an all girls school in both primary and secondary. I have one friend who has eben with me the whole way up but we really only became 'friends' aged 7..we ended up doing the same course in college and while we drifted in and out of each others every day live, we travelled to Thailand together in 2005, she moved to the UK in 2006, and now I am here (even tho we are hour apart) we are good friends.

I have one other girl I keep in touch with but others, no

Morag

Maybe because this is the ladies lounge were the posters tend to be predominately women.

I am in contact with not a single one and I am happy with that.
I swear 5 years of convent school is a type of hell.

Shoe Lover

Am 26 and still best friends with five of the girls from secondary school. I think it depends on the group! I've been friends with some of these girls for nearly 20 years! We meet up every two weeks for something to eat and a chat. They are great!

lilmissprincess

Started to lose contact with mine, all bar one, after school ended. Started college, then in November of first year, one of the close girlies from school died of a heart attack, which threw us all together again.
Now about a year and a half later I chat to some of them regularly but they're not my best friends anymore, we're all in different places.
My best friends are, however, people I met when I was in school and just happened to be part of my extra-curricular circle.

Scarinae

I'm still quite good friends with people I was in school with, although as I live in London now I can't see them every few weeks or whatever. The difficult thing about living abroad is that when you are home for a few days, it is really difficult to see everyone, especially if it is at a time like Christmas when people are doing stuff with their families. Another thing that is difficult is when you've all moved to different places - I'm in London, but some of my friends are in Cork, Belfast Aberdeen and Munich - not everyone will be there when I go home. One of my school friends has never even met my boyfriend, who I have been with for four years, because she went to college in Cork and we're never all in Dublin at the same time!

I may not know every single thing that is going on in my friends' lives anymore, and they may not know everything about mine, but when I do see them we just pick up where we left off. Friends from school can know you in a way that later friends don't, as they were there when you were growing up and remember the things that shaped your character and made you into the person that you are today.

One of my school friends is getting married in August, I'm going to travel back for the hen party and the wedding and I'm really looking forward to it as it'll be like a great big reunion!