"I thought I would, of course, have a hippie friend, a nerd friend, a gothic friend, whatever, but over the years I learnt that the people I like talking to and the people whose company and conversations I enjoyed were almost exclusively a subset of the people I went to university (and later, graduate school) with."
I was having a large diversity of "friends" before university and I do now have only a narrow subset of people I went through the university that I'm still getting along with, but I think I'm looking at it very differently than you. I haven't had much of a choice before but to deal in an as much graceful manner I could with all that zoo before, and that become like a second nature to me. They called me a friend. It was an easy thing to do for me as well -- to confuse friendship with what I had. I don't think many of us realize how energy draining is the low-choice period of our younger lives. The change that happens in time in this regard is just a natural process.
I was having a large diversity of "friends" before university and I do now have only a narrow subset of people I went through the university that I'm still getting along with, but I think I'm looking at it very differently than you. I haven't had much of a choice before but to deal in an as much graceful manner I could with all that zoo before, and that become like a second nature to me. They called me a friend. It was an easy thing to do for me as well -- to confuse friendship with what I had. I don't think many of us realize how energy draining is the low-choice period of our younger lives. The change that happens in time in this regard is just a natural process.