: Re: First quarter friends As I've mentioned before, I'm working on a military sci-fi novel. Here's the trouble with the military: you don't spend all of your service, start to finish, with the same

@Odierno164

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Just have him say thanks and goodbye and wish them luck.

I spent many years in my career as a consultant, everywhere I went I made friends, often for less than a year. These often began with lunches (everyone eats). I did my best when talking about my life and career to point out my stay was temporary, I would be moving on, and I liked it that way.

It is no different working in companies, at least in modern times. People come and they go; you stop seeing the people you've seen every day, even though you were friendly with them. Some that were particularly compatible still communicate with me; 90% of them have given up.

Friendship includes a healthy dose of shared experiences; when those end, the friendships tend to end. When I knew what people at IBM were talking about in reference to the internal politics and jokes about upper management, that was fun for me and my friends there. Once I disconnected, it is not fun for either of us; I am not up to speed on why the jokes are funny; and they would require too much explanation.

But that isn't a hostile end; I don't mind if an old lunch friend shows up and wants to visit and catch up.

A way out of that, to sustain a long distance friendship, is to focus on shared interests or experiences that we can still both experience despite being physically separated. Writing fiction is the first example of a shared interest I should mention (since we are on this site); pick the right person and you could have a remote friend, critique each other's work, talk about new fictions, etc. You might even collaborate!

Other interests might be politics. Finance and what is going on with the stock market. Sports. Movies and/or celebrity gossip. Developments in science and physics. Funny or viral YouTube videos! Music (and music celebrities).

Almost anything that has something new going on every day or every few days would count.

There is a psychological theory of friendship involving synergy. The basic idea is if you like music Type A, and I like music Type A, and we both search for good music of Type A, then by partnering up and sharing what we find, we double our search strength and increase our finds of good music of Type A. So we enjoy that partnership and call it friendship; as long as my other traits don't irritate you too much, and vice versa. Even better if you like my jokes, and I like yours.

That dynamic is maximized when there is a lot of stuff going on for the interest we share; otherwise you and I are finding the same things and little connection is created. Which is why I say something new every day or every few days, that is when the synergy can kick in and we become valuable to each other.

So your character lets friends go when all they shared was the ordeal of boot camp. He tries to keep them in his circle when they turned out to have shared interests and shared opinions, and a long distance friendship is viable (and you have some means of sustaining it). Otherwise, it's just "Man, you helped me get through this. Thanks for that, and good luck in your post."

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