Making Friendship Last: Advice on How to Keep Our Friends Straight From the Ones Who Are Doing It

Photo: My friend, Fe (L), & her friends, Kenny & Kortney.

One of the first questions I always ask a new client is, "Who is in your support circle? Tell me who is close to you. Tell me about your friends."

For a few women, their faces light up when describing friends who have been with them through thick and thin. They say that without them they don't know where they'd be, or if it wasn't for their friends and maybe some close family, they'd be in a mental facility somewhere.

When appropriate, I often pull on these relationships when giving my clients their homework for the week. "Go try this out with her," I say. "Tell her what we're working on, and ask her to do it with you so you can get used to practicing it in safe, and fun, company."

The stories are hilarious and moving as I hear reports of what goes on between friends in the name of mental health! If truth be told, I'd like to kick a few of them off my client roster just so I can participate in their shenanigans, but hearing about them is almost just as fun, so I shall keep my professional distance for as long as I can hold out.

I'm a sucker for friendship, what can I say?

But, as special and entertaining as the stories are, they are, unfortunately, not the norm. I'm hoping we can change that!

CHOOSING TO BE ALONE

For the majority of my clients and other women that I know, friendship has often been elusive at best and devastating at worst; in the end, it's proven not worth the effort, not worth the pain, not worth the disappointment.

Women have been knocked down enough times that, although they see the richness good friendships could provide, they've decided it's too hard to think about or work for again in the middle of everything else going on in life. It's just not something that's going to happen for them. It's sad but they're resigned, and honestly, it's fine, really, it's fine.

Who of us can't relate?!

ASKING THE EXPERTS

Never one to concede defeat to the Ghosts of Friendships Past, mainly because I have a few in my own closet I'd like to scare away, I decided to rely on my trusted FB friends for solidarity, wisdom, and advice, to see if together we could come up with something helpful for those who may still have a shot or two of hope, and too many years on this earth, left, to let bad friendship get the final word.

Here's what I posted on FB:

"Making and keeping friends is hard for so many of us! Too many bad experiences and eventually we give up and decide it's just not worth it. But even that decision doesn't protect us from the pain of being alone.

I don't know what the answer is. It's a pain point I've definitely felt in my own life, as well as in many other women's lives I've known and worked with...

If you're someone who is generally satisfied with the quality and quantity of friendship and support you get from the relationships in your life, HOW DO YOU DO IT? How do you stay open? How close do you let others get? How much time do you invest? How have you overcome betrayal to try again? How do you meet and make new friends or is that a priority to you?"

The answers were good... so good, in fact, that I decided to summarize some of the comments here for easy access. (To read the full comments on FB, click here. ).

INSIGHT FROM MY FACEBOOK FRIENDS:

My friends and I say, "You're more important." More important than our opinions, more important than our preferences. We've seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and we still CHOOSE to love each other. We always come back to the core of, "I love you, you're wanted here, my door is open."

My friends taught me how to just be a witness to other people's lives. To see them and hold space for them. They taught me to be present with other people, and I work hard to not be offended.

We've always given space for each other to grow. It's not always perfect, but allowing that person the grace to grow up is ESSENTIAL. Through our growing, we have always told each other, "You are still welcome at my table."

Honesty is the best policy.

Make sure there is a healthy amount of sharing. The conversation must include both of your interests and concerns.

Be consistent. If you give in to mood swings, people don't often stick around. The occasional awful day happens, but don't be like a teeter-totter.

I let people be who they are and love them where they are while I remain who I am. I've also understood that some people are just for seasons of our lives and like seasons, some people come and go. And that's ok.

Do what you say you're going to do. Don't make plans and flake out. Emergencies happen, but if it's every other time, people will move away from this friendship.

Keep confidences. NEVER share your friends' personal business with others.

Compliment your friends when deserved.

Maintain firm boundaries.

Treat them how you want to be treated.

Don't try to fix anyone. If they are making a bad decision, give a couple of options, then leave it alone and support them.

Look up what characteristics make healthy relationships, and all those same qualities make good, real friends!

I'm passionate about doing my own inner-work while being honest about my shortcomings. I keep an open mind... I don't need people in my life to believe and look exactly like me. I look for friends who are okay with being real human beings in process.

IS FRIENDSHIP WORTH THE EFFORT?

I think healthy friendship is worth the effort it takes. Personally, I see too big of a difference in the quality of life between women who have friends and those who don't for us to give up on it just yet.

I feel like I say this all the time in a million different ways: friendship is one of the best incubators I know of. It holds our pain, healing, joy, growth, and, with some work, becomes a safe place for trial and error that helps us work out our own personal kinks so that we show up more brave, more complete even, in other relationships and situations.

Healthy friendships teach us how to handle conflict, practice vulnerability, and trust ourselves because someone else believes in us.

What it comes down to for me is that the relationships we have with our friends invite us to become better at being human, giving us a place to express the beautiful, sad, whole, incomplete, scared, confident parts of ourselves. The parts that are happy to be seen. The parts that aren't sure they want to be seen. The parts we never even knew were there. There's something about friendship - its ability to hold both the pain and the beauty of life while it kicks our tails with safe honesty - that reminds us we're going to be okay, and we might even have a little fun getting there.

Do we need friendships to live? Not really. Technically, we can keep breathing without them. It's just that, from my experience, we survive - and thrive - better when we have friends, and that happens when we become better friends, which leads me to a comment I thought was incredibly important:

What is hardest is not being able to find people who are willing to make the effort and are emotionally mature enough to BE a good friend. It is usually the more healed and more emotionally mature adults that don't have any/many friends and have trouble finding good friends.

My hope is that through taking the advice of some of my friends, we can bridge the friendship gap - from making friends to keeping friends - by doing our own work of BEING a good friend, which includes a lot of grace, space to grow, encouragement, honesty, laughter, and carbohydrates never hurt either.

I happen to think we can do it, and do it well.

Thank you to my FB friends for showing us how.