Similar here, although there are no decent meetups where I am. I was the only one amongst my group of friends that caught the programming bug early on, and only one of two in my whole year group I think that went on to do software dev.
In hindsight it sucks a bit not being able to bounce things off friends, but you're normally/hopefully going to have colleagues for that. I guess the most dangerous situation is having no friends in IT, and working as the sole IT person somewhere... you may not get exposed to new ideas or best practices etc. Easily the most I've learned (in terms of useful things that I otherwise might have missed) is from pair-programming (can be frustrating too). Otherwise I think it's pretty healthy hanging out with non-IT people out of hours.