Not a friendship group, a household
It is not really a circle of friends. It is a household made of people who are not related to you, and you treat it accordingly. Pluto in Cancer in the 11th house puts survival-level attachment into community, so your group is where the family feeling actually lives.
The Cancer half of this is collective. Pluto marks a long span of birth years with the same tone about belonging, and it says nothing about you specifically. The 11th house is the personal half, fixed by your birth time. It aims the attachment at friends and the wider circle rather than at your relatives, which is why the people you chose have carried more weight than the ones you were given.
Whether these people would actually turn up
On whether the group is safe. Not on what it achieves, not on how interesting it is: on whether the people in it can be relied upon when something goes badly. You test that constantly and quietly, and your assessment of somebody is settled long before they realise it was being made.
The test is somebody leaving
Sooner or later a person moves away, changes, or simply stops coming, and it lands on you with a weight nobody else in the group seems to feel. That reaction is proportionate to what the group actually is for you. Say so at the time rather than absorbing it, since the others will assume it did not matter.
How the closeness is read
Some people find the depth you offer extraordinary and a few find it more than they signed up for, because a friendship with you carries obligations they did not know they were accepting. Both reactions are fair. Say what you expect early, since an unstated expectation is the thing that ends these rather than any disappointment.
A chosen family, with terms
Building kinship out of friendship is genuinely possible and it needs the same explicitness that any household needs: what people can expect, what happens in a crisis, who is responsible for what. Nobody sets those out. Do it once, plainly, since the alternative is an arrangement everybody assumes differently and nobody has checked.
When somebody drifts, you notice first
You register the change in a friendship weeks before anybody says anything, and the noticing arrives with a certainty that turns out to be right most of the time. What you do with it is generally nothing. Ask the plain question early instead, since the alternative is that you withdraw first and the drift becomes mutual.
You choose the team, not the job
When you assess an opportunity the deciding factor is who you would be working alongside, and the role itself comes a distant second, which has taken you into places nobody predicted and kept you out of others that looked ideal on paper. It is a legitimate criterion rather than a soft one. Say it out loud at the next interview, since it happens to be the question they can most easily answer honestly.
Shared costs settled by whatever feels kind
In arrangements with friends, who pays and who is owed gets decided by what seems generous at the time rather than by anything written, and you are reliably the one absorbing the difference. Nobody involved is being unfair deliberately. Write the split down at the start of the next one, since a recorded arrangement protects the friendship rather than casting doubt on it.
They are joining a household, not just you
A new partner is not entering a relationship with one person, they are joining an established group with its own history, expectations and standing arrangements, and you have rarely explained any of that beforehand. It arrives as a surprise somewhere around the fourth month. Say it plainly at the start, since described in advance it is workable and discovered late it is overwhelming.
The people you chose became the real ones
What you were given was not sufficient, so you assembled something else, and the assembled version has done more for you than the original. That is not a failure of the family, it is a construction of yours. Say to one of those people what they have actually been, since decades of implication is not the same as being told.