F*R*I*E*N*D*S

Friends used to be one of my favorite television shows.  I didn't watch a lot in high school, but in college, I was a faithful watcher every Thursday night.  A couple of the girls who all lived on the same floor would all go down to the common area of the dorm and watch together.  I even remember watching the very last episode together.    


I was watching a couple re-runs of the show this afternoon (gotta love syndication on TBS) and while it wasn't the last episode, I found myself wondering if the friends all stayed together even after Monica and Chandler moved out of the city with their adopted babies, Pheobe got married to Mike, Ross and Rachel had a baby and decided to stay together, and Joey failed in his spin off.  

In a perfect world, they would still be the best of friends, right?.  But I can't help but feel that in some way, the group would grow apart.  Obviously, a few of them would still be close (after all, Monica and Ross are related), but what would happen to Pheobe and Joey?  Would they still be as close with the rest as they were in the past, or would they have split off and gone in their own directions?


Sometimes I see other people I went to high school with and it seems like their big groups of friends are still just as close as they were 10 years ago (maybe they're not, but it's what I see).  I myself have only a handful of friends from high school, and even then, I talk to very few of them on a regular basis.  And while I have a number of acquaintances from college, I really only talk to a handful of them on a regular basis (by regular I mean once or twice a week).  Many people I was friends with in the past I hardly ever talk to anymore - as there was a natural progression of growing apart.  It's often bothered me, because in many cases I went through the process of chasing people to be my friend, only to be let down time and time again when they proved that they had already moved on.  It's taken me a long time to realize that it's not personal against me, but that people just move in different directions.  And sometimes, it still hurts more than it should.  But these kind of things happen.


So I often take my own personal experiences and compare them to other things - wonder why things are different in my life than those other groups from high school, or wonder if the friends from Friends would still be friends after the show ended.  Are you still good friends with big groups of friends from high school?  Or have you moved on to form just a few really close friendships that mean a real lot to you?