‘A Good Friend’ While Adulting

While making and maintaining friends was literally as easy as a walk in the park during childhood and adolescence, the transition into adulting squeezes the time we may have for friendships. Maintaining friendships while navigating adulthood may be a very different situation than you imagined during your teenage years.

People and circumstances change; personalities develop, families grow, we start businesses, immigrate and navigate the challenges of maintaining our health. All of these things and more, affect our availability and our ability to maintain friendships. The truth is, friendship, like all relationships, requires effort.

Your thoughts and suggestions on maintaining friendships are welcomed in the comment section. Here are a few ways to maintain friendships in adulthood:

• Time

• Be Present & Listen

• Boundaries

• Conclusion

Time

The thing we once had so much of is extraordinarily precious now. As growing a career, family or both, is now demanding our time. Spending time with friends starts to seem more and more unlikely. To maintain your friendship, spending time must be a deliberate action. Being deliberate means creating a schedule and budgeting your time. Spend is the key word here because this is where your generosity comes in. Scheduling time to facetime or sending them a gift is a good way to share your appreciation of them. During these Covid times you can set a time to have lunch together on facetime. Ordering lunch from the same place while you connect over a lunch break is a great way to maintain your connectivity. Gifting, even when it’s not a significant day like a birthday, is a great token of appreciation. Gifts can be inexpensive & meaningful, or something that you know they will enjoy, or that they would not buy for themselves.

Be Present & Listen

Part of scheduling your time with your friend includes being able to switch off from everything else. Whether it’s responding to instagram or text messages, set your phone and other distractions to DND for that duration of scheduled time. Even though it seems like it’s only a couple seconds to answer that text, it can take away from the experience of being with your friend and distract you away from really listening.

Listening, sometimes is all our friend needs from us. Whether it is heartache or a work problem, or family issues. When a friend is sharing a personal problem with you, sometimes it does not require our advice or input. It might be difficult because, as a friend, you want to help fix the problem. Depending on your relationship, boundaries and listening should be respected and giving your 2 cents instead of listening might later create resentment. Listening is often the best action in being a good friend.

Respecting & Understanding Boundaries

Everyone has different boundaries. Whether it is time, values, family or career: understanding and respecting boundaries is important. Respect, understanding and reciprocating boundaries are critical in adult friendships. Boundaries shift as we grow older. Even though this might be an old friendship, things do not happen to us in quite the same way. As we develop, our relationships shift and what we were once free to share is now different. Some boundaries are obvious such as, physical abuse, but sometimes boundaries can be blurry.

Having boundaries in your friendship makes it comfortable to maintain your friendship and to be yourself. Not all friends are in every aspect of our lives. It can feel awkward or labour intensive to include your friends who do not share a particular niche of your life. Recognizing and appreciating your friendships in different niches of your life will help maintain your friendship in adulthood. For example, you may have friends with children and those who are not interested in having children. It would be strange to talk about the latest edition to a parenting magazine with your friend who has no interest in having children.

Depending on your friend, the longevity and depth of your relationship, it can be easy to communicate each other’s boundaries. Whether it is easy or difficult to talk about, it is important to know each other’s boundaries in a friendship. The benefits of respecting boundaries are vast and deep and will be rewarding to both of you.

Conclusion

While there are no guarantees to maintaining a friendship into adulthood, spending time, being present, and respecting boundaries are all factors that play in my current adult friendships. Let me know in the comments what you think is important to maintaining your friendship in adulthood?