Congratulations! We're one year in to FIRE and life is better than grand.
A few things happened to us, friend wise:
* Conversations were awkward, but only at the beginning. Some people assumed we just didn't want to hear about their jobs anymore, for example, since we couldn't commiserate because we don't have jobs. This passed, but we made a special effort to ask about all aspects of our friends' lives in the immediate post-FIRE period.
* People (not many) who know about our FIRE status now believe it's possible for themselves, and we've gotten a LOT of requests for advice, to the point that I'm half considering the idea of becoming an FIRE coach. But, it's frustrating, because it comes down to wishing without behavior change for most of them. This is hard to watch: people open up about their finances, often unprovoked, which means we're effectively watching some train wrecks that we didn't previously know were train wrecks.
We have, for example, a friend who is a partner at a law firm and pulls down over $300k/year without bonuses. His wife is a SAHM, their house and vehicles modest and inexpensive. The eldest child is in public school, there are no childcare costs. They live paycheck to paycheck and I don't even know how. (Like, I literally don't know how that amount of money can be frittered away.) We've had to find nice ways to stay OPEN to giving advice, but also cut off the thread when it gets repetitive and people obviously aren't interested in doing the harder change work. Just something to consider in friend conversations.
* Happily, friends returned to being... friends. We shifted some previously work-centric activities because of that. Rather than happy hour (work focused because it's always after work), for example, we added hikes. Rather than eat dinner out and complain about our jobs, we invite people over for board games and cook outs and make a lot of food for them, and include their kids.
* I lost (was shunned by) female friends in tech, which was the field I worked in for 20 years. A big part of our time together was spent complaining about our jobs, and talking about things that should change (that gross harassing guy should be fired; I should get more sleep; we need to work less). When I bit the bullet and actually walked away, though, I was "jokingly" (not very) called a traitor to the cause, told I needed to continue to be an example for other women and tough it out, etc. I was totally surprised by this, at the time, and these work-centric "friendships" did not recover.
* I was outright called crazy, though my husband was not (he "deserved a break," no matter we both worked the same amount, in the same field, for the same duration). He noticed this gendered language more than I actually did and would just say things like "I'm sure Evie would really appreciate hearing that from you," which shut it down. It was odd, though. Like, we're both FIRE, we did it together, but he's The Exhausted Worker and I'm The Gold Digger all of a sudden? Weird stuff.
* On the brighter side, we have had MANY people tell us we're a huge inspiration and that they're now considering and/or making a lot of changes that they weren't previously.
Good luck and, again, WELL DONE!