Friends for Different "Purposes"

[youngyew]

Do you have one person to confide in, another person to talk crap, one person to share topic A, another person to share topic B? Or are they often the same person for all cases?

I find that as I grow up, my friends tend to become more and more "specialised". Often I go through my contact list to find the right person to share the one thing in my mind. And it used to be quite different when I was younger. In secondary school, friends tended to be "all-purpose".

Do you have more "specialised" friends or "all-purpose" friends?

[star90]

More 'specialized' friends especially in college. How I wish I can turn back the time, hanging out together with my 'multi-purposes' friends back in Secondary School.

[Glassylicious]

Well, to a certain extent, yeah, a small fraction of my friends are "specialized".

I usually only have one or two friends whom I confide in, but that's because we've known each other for sooo long I trust them with my personal issues.

There are a few people whom I fool around, bullshit and do stupid stuff with, simply because they're some of the few people who'd do crap like that and they won't start avoiding me if I do something downright strange. Hard to find people who'd clown around in the same way/degree as I do.

And then the rest are all "multi-purpose" friends as this topic would call them. Anyway, the "specialized" ones are really specialized in that way because of their personalities which matched what I was looking for, so to speak.

[vikraman]

IMHO, you stop making multipurpose friends as you grow up because less and less people you mix with have exactly the same cultural influences as you've had when you were younger hence making them different from you in many ways. Those differences prevent them from becoming multipurpose friends and that's why you make more specialized friends as you grow older. Multi-purpose friends are generally people who are a lot like you and the people who are a lot like you must have been the people who have had the same cultural influences as you've had and as such, they probably are/were your schoolmates.

[henry_yew]

Things haven't come to the point where my friends become so "specialised". Often, friends whom you could confide in can be friends whom you talk crap quite a lot, too. However, I agree that friends become "specialised" in a manner where you can't possibly discuss all sorts of topics with one particular friend.

When we made friends during our primary school or kindergarten days, it never occurred to us (or most of us) that we made friends for any sort of personal advantage, e.g. financial advantage. We made friends because we wanted to, and we enjoy the companionship. Well, that is not to say that we don't enjoy the companionship now, but rather as we grow up, some people develop a policy of "making friends for a certain purpose". It is at this point where many people would ask, "Who are my true friends?"

However, if you could maintain to have "multi-purpose" friends, then it would certainly be better for you. After all, you would then not run out of friends to seek help when you need it, without the hassle of choosing which friend to contact.

[eve88]

Hm... For me its not so much different "purposes" - i tend to drift from group to group - all the way through secondary school, and even now...

So like, there were the debaters, the band members, the badminton people, and my classmates - and mostly it was discrete groups of people (ie, noone was in all the groups simultaneously, and very few were in more than 2 groups).

So I'd ramble about different things to these different groups - but still readily hang out with any of them.

I have one or two friends I closely confide in (sad to say, these are the ppl who are most often on MSN....) - and with these i generally talk about anything.

[chongkeat]

Well, for me, it's multi-purpose all around, since I don't really know what they should "specialise" in. Yet.

[youngyew]

When I say "specialised" friend, I don't really mean you "use" or take advantage of them just for a particular benefit.

What I am referring to is more like, when you suddenly have this thought or saw this news, you often find that you tend to have different audience to discuss with. Like, if I want to discuss today's political news, I will find A. If I want to discuss Michael Jackson, I know that A may not be too interested, so I find B to begin with. If I want to talk about WoW, I find C. And so on.

[fran28]

interesting topic..i have multi-purpose friends i think..
there's one tht i can tell my stories in every detail and crap with
and one which i can only debate or study topics..
bt all of us is in a group..so its best to treat them all as multi-purpose

[trojan209]

youngyew, if your multi-purpose friend is a guy, he will be your best friend. If that multi-purpose friend is a girl, she will be your soul mate for life. That's what we call love relationship!