I wonder how many close friends does a startup cost too?<p>I am guessing If you are a founder, your time for social life will be very very limited, and a startup will cost 2 or more close friends.<p>One thing I found out, is that in general (for guys at least) is very easy to catch up and reconnect even after a long period of time of disconnect, as long as they are in the same stage lifes (eg. both being single, or not having kids, or both having a domestic life and kids, etc.). The disconnect becomes more permament when one enters a completely different stage of the life (having kids, will the major one), than the other friend.
When I went to orientation when I entered college, they were very explicit not to start intimate relationships until a month or two in (after the first chem test). One reason was we would find out how hard college really was and could judge whether we could afford that commitment, but another reason they gave was that you wouldn't develop friendships with other people nearly as much, and you needed that broader support group to help you in college. Plus heaven forbid you break up, and find yourself with no social circle at all.
Working as intended.<p>Of course, the fun part is when you break up after a long relationship where your social circles are very mixed. You run the risk of losing <i>all</i> your friends. Which sucks.
This is a classic case of statistics being useless. Are we actually supposed to avoid falling in love because of this negative effect?<p>It's like knowing that 50% of marriages end up in divorce. True, and damn irrelevant when trying to decide if <i>you</i> should propose or not. Individual marriages have either a 100% or 0% chance of success, and calculating the probability of those outcomes is not greatly informed by the "national average."
I call bullshit. The very definition of close friends is that they are close, whether you spend less time with them or not. I've got friends across the country and we're very close even though we meet a only few times a year.