I suppose in most med schools, especially with smaller classes, you end up becoming uncomfortably close with your fellow classmates. Assuming that you go to class (which I don’t), you see them day in and day out. You work with them in labs, in clubs, fundraising/volunteer efforts…you struggle through horrible tests…there is a whole lot of togetherness. My class isn’t actually that small, but since our town is, and because I vastly limit the people I spend my time with to people that I really like/enjoy the company of, it definitely feels that way. We’ve gotten super used to pretty much being half-clothed around each other + touching each other [professionally] because of OPP lab.
When most of your days are spent in and around school, it’s pretty inevitable to start thinking that this is just the way life goes. I was talking with a couple friends the other day and we all agreed that when we went home for winter break, all of us felt a disconnect between our friends. For me, it wasn’t really in a bad way, but as most of them are working now while I’m still slaving through another couple years of school, it was just different (and way more difficult to schedule mutually free hangout times).
This is fairly accurate. ._.
That said, I’ve never really had much of a bubble when it comes to really close friends (especially 6F. there is no bubble anywhere to be seen with them). There isn’t much of one here either. I think we’ve reached the point where we can pretty much talk about anything and it wouldn’t be TMI. Case in point, we were studying sexual deviance/paraphilias/etc., so the other night, when I was with my study buddy, we went into a fairly in-depth discussion of that and ended up looking up some truly…unique ones (they were disturbing to us, but to each their own; there’s someone out there for everyone). If anyone went through our uncleared search engines, it’d be a bad time for all of us.
The one I have the biggest “problem” with, so to speak, is partialism, mostly because I don’t think that should actually be considered a paraphilia (“recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors that occur over period of > 6 months”). I’m sure that by those standards, most people would have some sort of partialism–what if you just really happened to like butts? (Pygophilia, in case you care.) This may have just been due to the way it was presented in the lecture though (wiki actually explains it a little better–it isn’t considered partialism if it’s not part of normative stimulation or doesn’t cause significant psychosocial distress for the person/detrimental effects on important errors of their life).
Our conversations have gotten pretty interesting.
