Anybody move out of their hometown

Yes on the move. No on the abandonment feeling by friends.

A question that interests me:

Can anyone comment on the difference made by the internet?

Pre-net to stay in contact w/someone you'd either have to make a long distance call -- a big deal in the old days -- or go to the effort of writing a letter.

Now you can just update your FB page or shoot someone a quick email.

If you want, you never have to move on. And I guess you never really have a past, in the old sense at least

I moved for college and married someone from the college town, and we ended up settling in that college town/his hometown. I do miss some of my old high school friends from the Berry. But I’m not really good at keeping up friendships out of town. Not a phone person. I guess some people are better at that. I never call old friends to try and get together when I’m back in my home town. My siblings are really good about that when we all get together at our parent’s house (where we grew up). They’ll go and visit high school buddies.

I’m actually jealous of some of my old high school buddies that still live there or have moved back. Wimberley, Texas is truly god’s country.

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Moved at 17 for college and never went back... don’t know why, lost a lot of good friends. Guess I wanted to forge my own path.

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Very similar story here. Left home at 18 to go to school. My summers were always spent doing army stuff, working out for football in the fall, and I only spent a few days here and there at home during breaks. Fives days after I graduated from college, I packed everything I owned into my truck and reported to Fort Sill, OK. Then onto the Pacific Northwest, where I still remain 24 years later.

ETA: my tribe of friends all left Atlanta at some point and we went our separate ways. A lot of HS friends remained in the area, many of them left.

I left and did summer session to get a head start on things. Two weeks later my parents moved out of the town. (In the nearly 3 decades since then I've spent only 4 nights in that town.) Fall came around and it felt like I was running into old classmates everywhere I went. After State I lived in Indiana and Florida before moving to within a mile of where my wife went to HS. It was quite frankly a move made based on education for our kids.

My wife was a D1 All-American athlete from here and we've already seen glimpses of what that means for our youngest. We aren't sticking around long after the kids have graduated so where he goes to college might influence our next home. While in college we had decided on Nashville so we may go back there. My wife sprang the "I want to live close to the Atlantic Beach" card on me today.

She has more contact with athletes she coached after college than she does old classmates. Before Facebook I had 0 contact with any non-family from where I grew up. In the smallest of small worlds one of my confirmation classmates moved to Starkville for his PhD the year after I left and he still lives in MS...working for State. I didn't even know that until Facebook. The rumor had been that he got someone knocked up, never left home, and still worked at a pizza shop. I about fell over when we pieced the timeline together.

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Can anyone comment on the difference made by the internet?

Pre-net to stay in contact w/someone you'd either have to make a long distance call -- a big deal in the old days -- or go to the effort of writing a letter.

Now you can just update your FB page or shoot someone a quick email.

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The internet existed when I was in college, but social media was still in its infancy and cellphones weren't ubiquitous. I would have had to make effort to stay in touch w/ friends from college, and in hindsight I wish I had. But time flies by pretty fast in those years.

Weird thing is that, with Facebook, I know more about high school classmates than I do about college friends who I worked with and hung out with all the time.

I did but only moved 45 minutes away here to BR so I did not get that reaction. I'll move back home when I retire, too much crime and traffic here in BR for me and most of my best friends are still there.

Moved out of the small town a week after graduating from high school to go to college .Whenever I go back I get a nauseous feeling in my stomach. After Dad retired they moved back to my Mom’s small hometown.