The Secret To Adult Friendships

I am just gonna go ahead and put this out there, I am super weird about friendships. I don’t think I was always like that, but over the years and after some hurts I have approached friendships very differently than I did when I was a teenager. It’s taken several years, but I think I have found the secret to adult friendships. 

Friendships are a little easier to maintain in your younger years. You are grouped together by classes and extra curricular activities and it makes it easier to find people with similar interests and hobbies. You would spend all day at school together and then you would go hang out after school to do homework. Then go home and spend hours on the phone talking like you haven’t seen each other in years when in reality it had been all of like a half hour since you last spoke. You shared secrets and lockers and clothes and notes and it seemed like the bond you shared would be unbreakable. 

Then comes High School graduation and life starts to pull everyone in different directions. College, and marriages and babies (oh my) and before you know it those BFF’s are a distant, although fond memory. 

It can be a struggle to make new friends as an adult. Sometimes even more so when you add kids to the equation. Isn’t there some saying about if you want to see who your true friends are have a baby? I know that when my husband and I started growing our family we didn’t really lose friends but it 100% became harder to maintain friendships and eventually the phone calls to hang out stopped happening. It wasn’t all at once, but little by little things changed. 

After a time of feeling a little down about lost friendships and feeling like I didn’t have a group of girls that I shared life with I started to put myself out there in small ways. And thanks to the world of blogging and having zero hesitations about meeting up with strangers on the internet, I started to meet some pretty rad mamas that were local to my area. 

I still went about my days though not considering myself to have many girlfriends. Thinking something was wrong with me and stressing over the fact that I didn’t have a BFF all my own. It took me probably way longer than it should to realize the secret to adult friendships. 

Your Adult Friendships Will Never Be The Same As Your Childhood Friendships

Some where along the way I realized that I had completely unrealistic expectations of what adult BFF’s looked like. It’s not going to be the talking 24/7, spending every waking moment together, knowing each others every move. I am sure some people do have that, but honestly when you add marriages and babies and jobs and LIFE into the mix, it just makes it unrealistic. I feel like once I learned to let go of my idea of what the friendship should look like based on my ones from the past, I was able to embrace the the new friendships that I was forming. They may look a little different, but they can still hold just as much value. 

Once I started looking at my friendships with that new outlook I realized how fortunate I am to be surrounded by such amazing ladies. Ladies that challenge me and support me and encourage me and inspire me. Ladies in which I may not speak to daily or weekly or even monthly, but that would 100% do anything for me if I asked. It may look differently than I originally thought it should, but I am so very thankful for the friendships I have been blessed with throughout my life. The ones that have been in my life for a season and those that were/are in my life for a reason.