By Claralynn Schnell of Contemporary VA
It amazing how one person in our lives can bring us up or tear us down. Friendship is a key part of who we are as human beings. Friends fill a need within our hearts and souls to be social creatures.
Friendships are the hardest I believe in the high school and young adult years. I remember how lonely it would feel when someone didn’t like you, someone treated you like an outsider, or someone that you believed was a friend ignored you or gossiped behind your back. Oh the days that I would go home in tears and cry to mom. (On a side note…I am very glad to have 2 boys to raise!) If I knew then, what I knew now, how much simpler my life would have been then!
If I knew then that, I would grow in a person that I was proud of, and that those people in high school would have little say over my current life, I truly believe that I would have solved so much heart ache. Building lasting friendships comes with trust, respect and genuine love for one another. I have learned that I cannot make someone build a lasting relationship with me, what I can do however, is to be a person that they want to have that kind of friendship with. I know the friends that I trust with everything in my life, the ones that are just fun to be around and the people who are mere acquaintances. I no longer fret over decisions that they make and why they do not want to be friend. If I could tell my younger self these things I would!
Building a lasting friendship, comes with building a last person. It means, that you need to be good with yourself, love yourself, and want for your own goals before you can be an amazing friend. That is not to say that your friends leave when you are having a hard time, they are there to pick you up and put you back together, but in order to have those friends, you have to have built that relationship with them. For example, through my divorce, I knew the friends I could call, who would just let me cry, the friends I could call when I needed to hear hard things and the friends I could call who would cry with me. Those are the friends I cherish, the friends I would do anything for.
Are you struggling to find or maintain deep friendships? Please contact Paul and you can work on how to obtain these friendships.