When you’re ready to retire, do you want to live near lifelong friends, or do you like the idea of a new adventure, including new friends?
In “When Friends Move Next Door,” (Wall Street Journal, April 9th, 2021), Candace Taylor interviews soon-to-be retirees and developers who speak to a trend of people relocating together.
Taylor writes that real-estate agents and developers say, “Groups of friends–many of them empty-nesters–are increasingly buying properties in the same housing developments, preserving or re-creating their social circles from back home.”
Now, as someone generally obsessed with friendship dynamics, my first thought was about all the potential pitfalls. What if one couple is sort of a hanger on? What if everyone likes one spouse in a pair, but the other is only barely tolerable at best? What if you can afford to join in this new venture, but you choose not to? Will it feel like a massive rejection to the group and create hard feelings that change the group dynamics forever? The question of not affording it wasn’t relevant to this particular article since it was placed in the “Mansion” section of the WSJ, but in the normal world, that would be a major issue, too.
I appreciated the few lines in Taylor’s piece acknowledging the potential friendship issues at play here. She reports on a conversation between two of the men of the couple friends who discussed not having to invite each other to everything.
I think it would be essential to have those kind of conversations before even considering buying the neighboring property. Though I have to imagine if a group a friends is close enough to want to retire together, then they’ve probably already stumbled through questions about not always having to do everything together such as traveling with some friends but not others, and so on.
Friend groups retiring together in a new city–good idea or a good way to create trouble? What do you think?
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