We have all sorts of different friendships in our lives. Work friendships, school friendships, obligatory friendships and best of all – the friendships we choose, the friends that we love and trust with some of our deepest secrets.
Then we have situational friendships with neighbours, with beauticians, with our hairdressers. Often these friendships become quite fruitful, after all, these are the people that some of us see and talk to most regularly in our lives, that they now know our deepest secrets.
Personally, I have lots of different friends. I have friends who are MPs, vicars, mechanics etc. I have friends who are jealous of me, friends who use me and friends who constantly take from me or want something from me. Equally, I have dear friends who don’t want a single thing from me – just my company, friends who I can trust, friends who I can pray with, friends that I party with and seek counsel from.
What I find weird about friendships is that, dependent on the nature of the friendship, we normally tolerate a lot of things in friendships that we wouldn’t in other areas of our lives.
We become the best of friends with our partners or people that we date, but often those friendships disappear once the relationship does.
Then, I consider something really important – how do we make friends in the adult world? It’s actually pretty difficult. Where do you even make friends if it isn’t at work? At the gym maybe? At a bar?
Someone I know in her 20s doesn’t have many friends and she often attends ‘social meet up’ groups where people who don’t have much companionship get together to form friendships. I think it is a really brave thing to do – to be vulnerable enough to admit that you don’t have many friends, but to be courageous enough to do something about it. If my circumstances were different, I don’t think I’d be this brave.
For some of us, we struggle to manage all of the different types of friendships and keep up with them, but my advice is this … spend more time with the friends that you choose and who choose you. And spend less time with the ones that drain your soul or constantly take from you.
And for those who don’t have many friends at all, put yourself out there, and be brave enough to reach out to someone that you might not know. Most people are kind, decent human beings. What have you got to lose?