[chronofar]

> But they got married we got married, jobs, moving to new houses, life happened. You focus shifts over time to work and family. It gets harder.

Life didn't "happen" here, you designed divergent paths. This is I know largely a semantic nitpick, but I think this kind of phrasing belies the most common sort of problem that keeps people from doing things like what the OP suggests. In a way it often feels like "life happens" to us, and certainly in some cases that's largely true (unforeseen health complications or accidents for instance), but marriages and jobs and houses and friends really shouldn't feel like that. And if they do, it probably bears a bit of introspection and deliberation to ensure you're not just hurtling through milestones that seem age appropriate and are instead deliberately moving towards the best life you can imagine designing.

Note none of this is commentary on your specifics, of course I know next to nothing about you. I'm only attempting to focus on the phrasing there, and how I think it is indicative of a very common trap we can fall into wherein we can tend to relinquish agency and thus without thinking slide away from the things we cherish (such as friends close enough to be a kind of soul mate).

[zw123456]

Correct, you do not know me or my friends. You only know what I told you, that we had a lot of fun for a while, but I shortened what would have been a much longer story. It is easy to judge others when you do not know the details, I understand that. The best possible life is often a trade off between a lot of fun and responsibilities, children, family, careers, parents that need care and well, one could explain those things at great length, or one could say "life happens". Caring about others sometimes means making trade offs. I don't know you, so I won't judge you or your perspective, but you might want to consider broadening your perspective about what the best possible life entails. It's not always as simple as you might imagine. I wish you well, and hope you find your best possible life and find a way to understand how others often make a number of complicated calculations to find that, often that is not as simple as you might realize right now.

[chronofar]

As I attempted to make clear, none of what I said was judging you or your life or choices or anything of the sort, it was simply a reflection on a turn of phrase (a semantic nitpick as I said, but one I thought worth exploring because of the how often that phrase is used in I think subtly pernicious ways, again to say nothing about you specifically). But my apologies if this wasn't clear enough and it seemed I was judging your individual choices, definitely not my intention.

Of course there are trade-offs and it isn't easy (or possible) to get everything you want. My point was specifically around ensuring we feel responsible and in control of our life, not as though it's happening to us (which again is not a hypothesis about you specifically, just commentary on the language). It's a common trap, one I fall into all too easily, and language is I think an important way the trap gets lain. Perhaps you have not experienced that trap at all, again, was just focusing on the language.