Welcome to the Only Child Diaries podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Wallace. Have you ever felt like you didn't receive the how-to brochure on life, that you didn't get enough guidance about major life issues? So did I. You don't have to be an only child to feel this way. In my podcast, we'll explore some of the best ways to better navigate adulting, while doing so with humor and light. Welcome everyone to the Only Child Diaries podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about friends, friends and neighbors.

I've always been well, I've always seen the value of friends in my life, and I've always worked hard to keep good friends close to me. Friends are something that I think are very valuable in everyone's life, and I also think that it's something that you need to spend time cultivating and working on. Friends and friendships don't just happen. Friends take time, just like anything else. It's valuable Friends, relationships with friends. Well, let's face it, you don't become friends with everyone that you meet right. There needs to be common interests, common likes, even common dislikes, and so the people who become your friends sometimes are few and far between. As you go through this life, your friends also change. I mean, that's just a given. That's why people who have been your longtime friends are probably more valuable than you might even realize. I think, as I've gotten older, the people that I've known for a long time, that I have history with, that I've been friends with, I value even more today than I did when I was, say, 20 years younger than I am now, because people do move on and people do well, let's face it pass away, and having people that you know that have common history with you is important. You can talk about the past, you can talk about shared experiences and you can talk about things that the other people know, without going back and starting from square one. So, but let's talk a little bit about friend maintenance.

As I like to put it, friends do take time to cultivate, but they also take time to keep up with. Right, because it's like any other relationship. You need to spend time showing that you care, because, well, time showing that you care because, well, if they're your friends, you do care about them, and they need to also spend the time showing that they care about you. Friends aren't just people, that well. It's not just a one-sided relationship, or it shouldn't be a one-sided relationship. It should be a mutual thing between two people. They should reach out to you as often as you reach out to them. That's what I think.

Friends who will respond to you when you reach out and not reach out to you, I start to suspect that maybe their commitment to you as a friend is not as strong as maybe your commitment to them. Maybe they've moved on, maybe they don't share the same interests anymore and maybe they have other friends who well, let's face it, they like better, they enjoy spending time with. That doesn't mean that you can't be friends with them anymore, but maybe they just don't hold that same place in your friend list, place in your friend list. Maybe they're not friends that you share the same basic living space with. They share a common neighborhood with you. Maybe they're your next door neighbor, or the people down the street, people in the same building where you live, people that live a floor below you or a floor above you, maybe on the other side of a building, maybe the other side of a complex. Neighbors can be friends, yes, as I've said, but neighbors are kind of a special breed of friends. Sometimes you are not maybe as close as you would be because you're a neighbor. I mean, you don't want to maybe share too much because you live right there, right, and you don't want to share too much of your life because you still want to have some privacy with your life, right? So sometimes there is a bit of distance between people who are neighbors. Maybe it's not a full-on friendship, maybe you don't give that many details about your life or your goings-on because they can see everything that you do. But neighbors are still important relationships and you should have good neighbors and you should have neighbors that you enjoy spending time with, talking to, et cetera, before you go back into your respective living spaces.

Having a neighbor who you don't get along with, you don't agree with, you, don't like, who doesn't like you, can make it kind of a tense situation, especially if you and your neighbors argue with each other. That's always a bad situation and it makes your living space less than positive. I found I remember when I was growing up the woman who lived next to my parents for some reason had a fight with my parents, although I never saw it personally, but I guess at some point there was some sort of an argument or a disagreement and my parents never talked to her and she never talked to my parents and she was older and then she ended up moving out and her family sold the house. But it was always kind of an awkward situation. I remember, and being a child, I wanted to explore the well that side of our yard, but I was cautioned against looking over the fence or looking through the hedge or what have you. I didn't really fully understand what had happened or why it was, but I tried to maintain my own boundaries there, and that was really my first experience with having a neighbor that I didn't get along with.

Certainly, in apartment living there are a lot more opportunities for not getting along with people because you're in a much more compacted space. People can be loud or noisy at inappropriate times of the day. Not everybody has the same schedule and so that makes it a little bit more challenging, often for many reasons, a much better deal in that respect. In our neighborhood there are still people that get upset if somebody's house is having a party late, say after 10 pm. But I don't think I would ever complain about that, having lived in an apartment so long. I just like it if people are enjoying their lives and enjoying a party and enjoying fun, and I see it as just a matter of living and living happily right. I would never call the police on them, but some of the neighbors do. So it's neither here nor there, but that's the way it goes. So, anyway, back to friendships.

I think friends are very important in our lives to keep us happy and to keep us balanced, and I think that friends also enrich our lives. I think, as an only child growing up, sometimes it was a little bit more challenging for me to keep my friends and I think or to meet friends, rather, and I think I worked harder to keep the ones that I did have I sometimes felt a little bit more awkward in the beginning of a friendship or meeting somebody that I thought would be a good friend. Sure, sometimes I was wrong and I thought somebody was going to be a good friend or somebody was a friend, and it turned out that they weren't and that I did have some really close friends growing up and they were other girls, and that gave me an opportunity to really grow and learn from those relationships and not having siblings, that really helped me to learn how to just have a relationship with another person. I learned a lot from that experience, and so I think that, in terms of only children growing up, definitely friends are very important. So that's all I've got for today. Next week we'll tackle another topic together. I hope you'll join me.

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