Long distance adult friendships: do they work?

Do kids make adult friendships, particularly the long distance kind much harder to maintain?

Do you ever stop and think about your friendships? More specifically, do you contemplate how the nature of your friendships has changed since you finished univeristy? Or, if most of your friendships are long distance like mine are, do you mull over what makes them work? My friends are always on my mind, but they have been more so than ever since I moved to Miami nearly nine months ago.

Maintaining friendships, namely the good, solid kind is never easy. However, things are significantly less complicated when the majority of your friends live in the same city as you and everyone's in school. The playing field is even, so to say. But it's when college ends that everything changes. People get jobs, they move away, relationships become more serious, and friendships as you once knew them --  are never quite the same again.

The fact that I haven't seen some of my closest friends for several months, or that sometimes a month can go by without a phone chat -- is still a bizarre concept for me to wrap my head around. Yet somehow it works.

How? For starters, three components should be in place for a thriving long distance adult friendship: 1) you have to really like each other, 2) you need a shared understanding that adult life is busy, and 3) there must be a mutual desire to maintain the relationship.

If the aforementioned criteria are satisfied, then it's up to you and each individual friend to redefine the friendship on your own terms. For instance, given the schedule of certain friends, we end up speaking only every few months and exchanging texts once in a while. Conversely, there are friends I'll Skype with once or twice per week. I find the relationship doesn't suffer in either case as long as both parties involved are happy with the "arrangement".

Unfortunately, between my move from Montreal to New York City, and then from Manhattan to Miami, some of my friendships have withered. Meanwhile, those that survived have inevitably had to change in one way or another. But change I'm learning can be good, and the more I move and grow older -- the more I treasure my friends.

My boyfriend thinks keeping a long distance friendship going only gets harder when kids enter the picture. He's probably right; kids make virtually everything harder. It's also true that once you have children they become the focal point of your life and you end up gaining a whole new circle of friends comprised of their classmates' parents. Hmm...

No one can predict the future, but the past suggests my long distance friendships will continue to endure changes down the road. That in mind, change, like I said before can be a positive thing. And didn't someone once say if there's a will -- and you really like your friend(s) -- there's a way?

xoxo

Val