Key To Successful Friendships
I think it’s funny how people journey to become grown individuals and at the same time learn how to hang on to their past friendships and people. Some succeed, some don’t.
People become different—grow up, strive for success, personal life-goals, and develop individual perspectives on life. Basically these differences cause friendship bonds to break and patience along with trust to be tested. Especially in ones built at a young age. Change in people is inevitable in any case.
The key is to obtain respect for each other’s differences, to ultimately preserve old bonds. It will also take a certain maturity level entailing self-awareness.
Strangers become friends and gravitate towards each other because initially share great deal of similarities.
Often in life, separation in friendships causes us to go through our own experiences, meet new people, which therefore make a huge impact on our perspectives. Time apart may evolve person’s intellect, attitude and eventually the changes become apparent to your friend. If he/she hasn’t gone through similar stage in their life, arising on the same maturity level, don’t expect any mutual respect, understanding or acceptance of each other’s differences. It will simply be frustrating and annoying for one person in possession of the knowledge to balance the friendship on their own.
Also, “rocky point” in friendships appears when “new friends” come along. It may be a recently adapted friend of your best-friend and as much as you’d like to be good friends with that person too, it is impossible to alter their personality or habits. It may become difficult to “share” your best-friend with an incompatible person for whom you often have little to no patience. Ultimately, conflicting with your own friendship.
We as human beings learn from these difficult experiences. Some friendships survive and become stronger than ever. Some “former” friends come to realization when the trust and friendship are gone and all you have are memories. It’s funny because we all can recall parents telling us that we will understand them when we’re older. Then when worst comes to worst, we look back and laugh at our stupidity, relating those “words of wisdom” to different situation, like broken friendships because we couldn’t ignore our huge egos. Just like we weren’t intelligent enough to comprehend that life tweaks all of us.
Losing friends can be fearful and painful, easily compared to a heart-break. The thought of losing a person who has played a huge part in your life is honestly unimaginable. Unless you’ve been through break-ups of course.
They all say, “communication is the key” just like in any another relationship. Knowing how to keep a friend is more important than gaining a new one. In order to maintain a successful friendship we need to express our both negative and positive thoughts and feelings that will absolutely help us gain mutual respect and understand one-another on a deeper level- (assuming presence of maturity).
Elona Voytovych | Elite.
