My wife [26f] and I [31m] are having a very difficult time meeting people who enjoy doing the same things we do, which up until very recently we thought were just normal activities everyone likes. I can't figure out if everyone's changed or if we're just going about this in a weird way.

Hey all, hope your day's going well. Before I start I want to point out that this is primarily something we've noticed pre-pandemic. We've all been very safe during the pandemic.

Brief backstory, my wife and I both grew up in lower-middle-class suburbia about a thousand miles apart, and have fond memories of childhood and the types of activities both sets of parents (who would have been age 27-35 at the time, about the same ages we are now) and their friends all did.

For example, each of the neighborhood dads would have a cool toy (like a top of the line grill, or a boat, or a bunch of quads, a pool, etc) and one weekend we'd go over to the grill guy's house for a cookout, one weekend all the dads would get together and go fishing with the boat guy, one weekend all the families would go over to swim in the pool and hang out with the family with the pool, you get the idea. Obviously not every weekend, but it happened often. My dad didn't have any boats or pools, but our house had a split basement where one side was a playroom for the kids (like game systems, board games, and art supplies) and the other side was a 'playroom' for the adults, complete with two pool tables, darts, and a minibar.

The neighborhood moms would usually work part-time jobs, and then on weekends take all of the kids to the local pool or the beach. I remember many summer days of loading up the station wagon with coolers full of Capri Suns, potato salad, and snacks from the Dollar Store to head over to either the pool or the beach where I'd meet all my friends, and my mom and her friends would not-so-sneakily drink a shit ton of wine coolers. Sometimes they'd trade off and the dads would all stay home to watch the kids (which usually meant they'd watch the game, send the kids to the basement to play video games, and we'd all get pizza and wings for dinner) while all the moms got dressed up and went clubbing.

My wife had a very similar childhood experience, with a few key differences (different parenting styles and different political climate), but what we both gathered from it all was "we work hard and play hard" and "this is how normal people live".

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Currently, we're trying to do that, minus the kids because we don't have kids and don't know anyone with kids, and everyone we've met thinks it's weird. I understand that the pandemic is kind of screwing up any outdoor fun people want to have right now, and we've been taking the pandemic very seriously and staying indoors, but we've noticed this well before the pandemic as well. We lived in the suburbs in New England for a while, then we moved to a college town, now we're in an urban area in the South, and in each of those areas, we've found a group of friends, but haven't been able to find anyone who likes the same activities we do.

We like fishing, grilling, going to the beach, going to the pool, taking a staycation just for fun, going clubbing in the city, having backyard parties and cookouts, hosting dinner parties, going camping, when we were in New England we'd invite people out to our lakeside cabin to go kayaking and drink wine and enjoy a day out at the lake, you get the idea. Don't have a boat yet but we're working on it. We're both very social people. We haven't met a single person who wants to do literally any of those things, mostly because they're "exhausting". It's not like we're asking people to go skydiving or take helicopter lessons; I feel like all the things we're interested in are pretty regular, everyday activities.

We've had people call us boomers, we've had people jokingly compare us to golden retrievers, and almost everyone calls us 'extra'. While I'm sure most of it's just joking around, we've definitely gotten the vibe that the things we like to do are very strange. This is odd for me because I've always considered myself a pretty normal guy, so it's weird to be the odd one out. Most of the people we've met in the past 5-6 years seem kind of lethargic and almost everyone acts like Eeyore, and I'm not saying that to be mean, I just don't really understand it at all.

Where should we be meeting people who are more like us? Do people like that still exist?

tl;dr We're looking to meet people who enjoy the same activities we do (once the pandemic is over of course). Most of the people we've met tell us the things we like to do are "exhausting".

Submitted May 05, 2021 at 03:13PM by ThrowRa_funinthesun https://ift.tt/3eYGz7m