Hi all! I'm currently living in AZ with my partner attending grad school. He has a friend who I've also befriended from the Boston suburbs, while I'm originally from the Seattle suburbs, where I met my partner. These details are kinda relevant a bit later.
So this friend from Boston has a habit of making a big deal about how different my partner and I are from him and his friends back home. He tends to make it an East Coast vs West Coast thing, which to an extend may be true, but I have many friends from all over the East Coast, including from or in Boston, and I've never had any of them make such a big deal about how different things are.
For instance,this friend is very social and full of energy. I can be social, but I'm still introverted and can't maintain that same energy. This friend has said people back home are always available to hang out and hang out way more than the people in grad school/"out here". I don't even think this is a different coasts issue, just a grad school thing, plus we aren't even currently on the West Coast anyway.
Another example is about having friends of the opposite gender. He has only male friends and says none of them have female friends because there's the risk of catching feelings etc. I have about an equal amount of friends of both genders, and that's always been the case even before I was with my partner. I've also asked my east coast guy friends about this and they've had many female friends too. Yet our Boston friend seems to think this is odd and possibly more of a West Coast thing?
Some important details I think are relevant in this friend's case are that he grew up around all his friends in the same neighborhood in a smaller suburb, and they're also all Jewish so they're very tight knit. Most of these friends still live there with their parents and aren't interested in branching out. Also, he went to a expensive private college in Maine, not sure what the demographics were there too, but he claims even his friends from college don't think like we do. My partner and I are both Asian American and have lived in multiple large cities, my partner also spent a significant amount of time in the UK so that could be part of the differences our friend feels too. Maybe the real differences have to do with our specific communities and possibly racial and economic differences.
Anyway, I can't help but get annoyed when our friend makes a big deal out of our differences when I've never had anyone else do that. I usually try to argue back, but when he says literally no one back home has such views, I start to wonder if maybe I'm rhe weird one loll. How would y'all handle this, and is there any insight from someone who may have had a similar background as him or interacted with similar people? Thanks!