harder to keep long term friendships when older

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From your experience, do you find it's harder to keep long term friendships when your older? For me: when I was in highschool and middle school, I had trouble socializing due to my AS dissability, none the less I had a couple of friends and made a few more later on. These friends have always stayed with me throughout my highschool career. However, now that I'm 29 living on my own, I have made quite a few more friends since highschool and got quite close with many of them, but the weird thing is, I have never been able to keep them long term. Few of them I lost due to disagreements, but the weird part is is I've lost contact with most of them without any reason that I consider bad or my fault. It's like they just disappear and when I try to contact them, it takes a lot of effort and they are hard to reach...always to busy...sometimes they don't want to hang out with anyone which I think sounds silly....sometimes even after petty things that wasn't my fault...or other things that I'm not even sure. Do you find it harder to keep lasting friendships when your older compared to when you were younger too?

I am less flakey and so I am more stubborn about loyalty.

I had that problem when I was in school during my adolescent years because everyone around was hitting puberty and maturating while I still wanted to be a child. Suddenly it was a big joke to talk about cartoons all the time. I was also in special education during middle and high school. The other hf students were not on the spectrum so I could not relate to them and was often misunderstood. When there were people on the spectrum they were much lower functioning all the time. When I did make a friend, she was a 50+ year old bus driver who was a great mentor.

Then I was friends with a girl outside of school for about 6 years and then she hit puberty about a year or so after I did and started maturing. She grew to be very insecure and mean due to several issues of her own. She was also not on the spectrum. She became really guy crazy and rejected me.

Finally I had reached my early 20's and decided that it was time to join some Autism support groups where I could relate to other people. I was able to make some other friends and develop a support system as a result.

as a child I could only really relate to sympathetic adults.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat as you are and the only difference is I'm living with parents and still figuring out the next step in life (finding a job or maybe going back to school for additional training) while still forming IRL friends. The closest friend I had was a childhood friend that I often hung out with, but ever since he went to college, it has been very hard to stay connected with him as he has his own circles in college and he also has a gf, so he is quite busy. I still talk to him once in a while, but it's just that he's moved on so we have a distant relationship. As far as the friends in high school and college, I haven't been able to make any "true or close" friends during there, and some that were friends also moved on so pretty much I'm basically alone for the most part.

@Summer
That's pretty much the same way I was when growing up. I rarely had friends and those that were (pretend friends) are only there just somewhat sympathetic, so aside from them, I don't really have many real friends. As far as a support group, are you referring to WrongPlanet? Also, I definitely like to be a part of our circle around here as I share most of the problems that a lot of people here have.

I think that it's harder to make social mistakes as an adult because people have more freedom to move on from people that they don't necessarily get along with the best. In high school, you are often taking classes with the same people, so they stick around due to proximity - if you are there, they might as well forgive and try their best to get along with you. However, when people are adults, they have generally less time for everyone due to work, school, family and other priorities and therefore no longer have the time or patience for people who they feel aren't worth their time for whatever reason. It means that you may have to work harder to keep these friendships - that's a fact of life.

The good news is that with this freedom as an adult, you are able to seek out more opportunities to yourself and to keep trying. If you want to work on your social skills, ask family or the friends you do have what mistakes you tend to make, and then find ways to avoid doing them. Better yet, you can seek out others like you by finding people like you in ASD-centric groups. As well, you can practice advocating for yourself to explain what you have difficulty with socially so that there's less of a chance people will take your behaviors personally.

It's capitalism and the predominance of the "nuclear family" that makes for less closeness in adult life, especially for people who live alone.