A Question For Swiss People?

Got a question. Why do people from small towns choose to only hang out with people they grew up with?

• So when I was raised, we lived in the suburbs of a major city. You were looked at as abnormal if all your friends were from the same town as you were. People expanded their horizons. When they got old enough to do so, they would build friendships with people from all over. When we turned 21, we headed downtown every weekend and hit up all the nightclubs and created multiple friendships. We were very social creatures to say the least. A few years ago, I had to relocate to a very small town for a period of time due to work. During my time there I learned that the people that lived in this small town for the most part all grew up together. I would think to myself "These people only live about an hour away from the city, and all their friends they have known their entire life." Even there parents and grandparents went to school together. The women? They married people they went to high school with. If they are not married, they are dating someone who they grew up around. Where I am from, that just doesn't happen that often. Like I said, people from where I am from, expand their horizons and build friendships and marriages with people that quite often they did not grow up with. The small town people never leave unless they have a family emergency and have to be transported to a major hospital in the city. They have just as much as an opportunity to learn to expand their horizons like we did, but they choose not to. When you try to talk to them, male or female, they look at you in confusion like you are talking about a whole different world if you ask them to meet people and go places away from where they from. Its very strange. I think of it like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Anyway can someone please explain this to me?

• Answer:

  You go with what you are familiar with. In the city you are exposed to new people/places/ideas so you embrace the variety and take advantage of it. It's what your friends do, and what people you know have done, so it's easy to go with the flow and do that. In a small town you aren't exposed to those new people and places, so the culture tends to be based around itself and become more personal. When people act like their friends have been acting, they adopt the small town mentality and tend to act that way. Some people in small towns hate that and move to larger cities. Others like it and stay. Personally, I grew up in Los Angeles. I'd hit the clubs in Hollywood during my college years. But when I got married I moved to a small town where my wife grew up. I didn't want to party anymore, and I like the close-knit community where I know the police and town officials on a first-name basis. When my daughter gets older I'll encourage her to go away to college so she can be exposed to city life.