What is friendship?
- It is a close bond between two people.
-
A true friend is someone who is there for you when they’d rather be somewhere else.
-
A true friend is someone who accepts what you are and still gently invites you to grow.
-
It’s a friend who can call you up at 4 a.m. no matter what.
-
A true friend is someone who casts you in when the rest of the world has cast you out.
OK, this is a topic most of us can relate to, and when starting to discuss it we find it is a never-ending story!
I want to tell you about my group of friends. There are five of us and we all grew up together and lived in the same suburb. I’m going to share with you some of the ups and downs of my 20 years of friendship and fill you in on what I’ve experienced regarding the dos and don’ts of a friendship. I promise it isn’t easy, and I’m still learning about friendship as time goes on!
Well as we all know, it is definitely different being a boy in a boy’s group and a girl in a girl’s group. That’s what I’ve heard from boys and know of girls. There’s always competition, jealousy, envy, and so on between girls no matter how close! Yeah, well guys too, but the difference is that guys don’t naturally show it but girls tend to show it all the time, by doing or saying the weirdest things, and that normally makes friendships unstable.
I have a long story that I will cut short. It’s about what my friends and I went through that caused a breakup but made our friendship stronger in the end. Here goes:
My sister and I are studying in Cairo, while the rest of our three friends are in Cape Town, South Africa. It all started when my sis and I went home for the summer holidays and we were introduced to a girl that our youngest friend, K, had brought into the group. We didn’t know much about her but we welcomed her to the group. Everything was going along fine; we had our normal sleepovers, fun times, and all that. Sometimes we’d get stranded in places, have our soppy sulking moments and so on.
We are all good friends together but each of us has our own special friend from the group that we share some of our secrets with. Well, I got really close to the new friend, L, and we started sharing secrets. Then one day L told me that K had spoken badly about me. K was a bit jealous because L was her friend first, so I just left it. But it got worse, and I didn’t think K would go to that extreme and make up bad things about me. I didn’t want to make a big problem out of it so I didn’t want to confront K; I just ignored it. Then all of a sudden I realized that K was treating me really harshly, and I thought to myself that I’m the one who is supposed to be angry not her, so why is she treating me like this? I told my sis W about what L had told me and she got really upset and wanted to confront K immediately, but I begged her not to because I didn’t want L to get into trouble.
|
This carried on for days, until R, the eldest in the group and K’s sister, came up to me in a way that shocked me and made me freeze right there on that spot. She said how she thought we were friends, and that we were supposed to stand up and look out for each other and not go around spreading rumors, like what I’m doing to K. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard and I swore to her that I’d never said anything about K, but she refused to believe me! That broke us all apart and we didn’t speak to each other for weeks. There was one of us left, F, and she had been kind of the middle man who believed both sides of the story.
L still came to visit me, telling me more things K had been telling her. To cut a long story short, finally after communication, we found out that L was the problem. She had caused unnecessary problems between us by making up stories about everyone. We solved this by apologizing to each other, so we were all happy again and decided that we should rather stay 5, rather than 4 or 6 friends!
The main ingredients of a close friendship are communication, honesty, care, patience, respect, and most of all TRUST!
So if your friendship has gone a bit weak, don’t despair; just give it a little tweak and it’ll be perfectly tuned in no time!
Don’t miss out on part two where I’ll share with you some precious pieces of advice. See you around!
|
what is this?
This widget will help you to store, organize, search, and manage your favorite online content through a range of social bookmarking services. These services permit users to save links to websites that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, or shared only inside certain networks. Authorized people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or through a search engine. Most social bookmarking services also permit their users to vote and rank public bookmarks to determine which are the best ones according to the number of votes they get.
|
