The True Meaning of Friendship!

In my life, I have met thousands of people.   Some have stayed briefly, some have stayed for a while and some are still in my life.  Today I spent a wonderful afternoon with a very dear friend who I have to say, makes the best coffee in the world (sorry to my poor old IBS lol).  We haven’t caught up for a while so it goes without saying that we had a heap of goss to catch up on.  We spent a lovely time filling each other in on our amazing journeys to date – including the good, the bad and the plain old ugly lol.  As would be expected when two women get together, we covered a multitude of topics, in a short period of time (yes guys, women can actually talk about two things at the same time and keep up with the convo very easily lol) and the subject of old friends came up.  We both found ourselves merrily tripping down memory lane to when we were teaching together many years ago.   


I now find myself pondering the meaning of friendship and realised that sadly, in this day and age, the word friend is becoming very generic.  A classic example is our Facebook friend list.  Let me ask you this – how many of these friends on Facebook do you actually know personally?  How many are actually true friends?  And more to the point, what is your definition of a Friend and Friendship?


Before I give my definition on what a friend is to me, let’s get technical for just a minute.  According to the dictionary a FRIEND is a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard;  who gives assistance; who is a supporter.  There is also another word being ACQUAINTANCE, who is a person known to one, but usually not a close friend.  My feeling is that these two words are now being confused in many cases causing a very grey area for the word friend.


So let’s get back to my thoughts on this.  To me, a friend is someone who cares enough to give their honest opinion on my situations, has no expectations or rules about our friendship and is willing to say they don’t agree with me and give me another perspective.  These are the friends who I love and cherish as a huge part of my life.  You see, I am the type of person that looks at every situation, especially challenging ones, as learning experiences so I want people in my life that will help me to do that.  I have never really respected “Yes” people or those who sit on that proverbial fence.  A true friend is one who realises that we all have our own lives and sometimes we have to divert our attentions to other priorities.  A true friendship is one that, no matter the length of time between calls and visits, picks up where it left off without any guilt about not keeping more regular contact.


I also believe that true friendships, actually all relationships in fact, should be beneficial to both people, allowing growth of both people as well as the friendship itself.  I have been in situations before where I have pulled away as I truly believed that I was not helping the other person by listening to the same old complaints time and time again, with no change or growth.  I have been strongly criticised for doing this.  I am avid about taking responsibility for our own emotions and reactions and whilst I totally understand that sometimes we have challenging situations that happen, we have a choice how we deal with them.  I will not support someone who consistently adopts a victim mentality and refuses to heed the lessons or do something positive to change the situation.  I personally call these people high maintenance and they drain the life literally right out of me.   I do not expect any of my friends to support this behaviour in me, in fact I would be relying on them to hit me between the eyes with my own reality and encourage me to move forward.  I know this makes me sound like a cold hearted bitch but to be honest, I really don’t care.  I simply will not participate in someone’s self destruction.  Having said that, I totally understand that occasionally we all need a good old fashioned off load  – hell, I’ve had a few of those myself recently too.    


Although I have hundreds of people in my life, I have only a handful that I call my true friends.  These people are true to themselves and allow me to be true to myself  and I am blessed to have them as a part of my life.


To these dearest friends I say thank you for being in my life - I love you!  You know who you are!


Take care and bye for now!
Smiles,
Meg :)