Of course, the family people probably were friends with each other.

Everyone at family company was friendly at lunch, it's just the we didn't socialize after work at all (well a couple of times). The younger company regularly went drinking together.

Are you sure the ones with kids weren't doing playdates and things? I feel like there's often a gulf between people with and without kids.

Of course they didn't go drinking, they had to get home to take care of kids. Or, like me, they don't drink. They might still invite over other families to go hiking or camping or maybe even know other parents from school.

Not saying that was necessarily happening, but now that many more of my friends have kids (I don't) I see them do this all the time. They can't really hang out without a way to distract their kids. Board game nights are much more likely to connect than drinking.

Not that I was aware of. The age groups of the children were different and a lot of them lived outside of the city.

Actually, let me put it this way. If you are relying on your employer to provide opportunities to make friends, you're shifting responsibility for maintaining relationships from yourself to your employer.

I don't think that's a good idea. When people elsewhere on this thread have commented that back in the day people's main opportunity to make friends was at work, they didn't mean that work gives them opportunities actively but rather that it gave them personally the opportunity to personally create a relationship with a coworker.

Agreed? There's a huge difference between the relationship you create by inviting a work friend over to your home for dinner and video games (or going to a bar even) and the relationship created by the "team" going to a "team building activity" together. Don't rely on work to provide the context to make a friend, but it's fine to rely on work to provide an opportunity to make a friend.

Within reason and assuming good actors, etc. I probably wouldn't share every detail of my personal life with work-friends and certainly older generations did not. I suspect the two are related; you have to be more guarded with work friends because social vulnerability can be very risky in a work environment. My mother didn't talk about her disability with work-friends much, only the work-friends she'd invite over for dinner. I share about my condition much more because I want and expect even "just" work-friends to understand and accept my limitations. The story I hear is that it didn't use to be at all safe to be vulnerable like that with colleagues.

I am not saying its anyone's responsibility, it was just an observation between two different workplaces.