Redefining Friendships

Hello mates... How's life?

  We could start this post in so many ways but I feel like explaining why this topic matters to me is the best way to do it. We all (or at least most of us) think we know what friendship is right? Well, culturally it has countless meanings but what matters the most is how we deal with it on our everyday lives because it does affect the way we relate to people, at work, in our families and just in general. I've struggled for years to keep the friends that I had because I didn't understand WTF a friendship is. I expected way too much and delivered way too little as a friend myself. Now I've gotten to a point in my life where I feel comfortable building friendships, I'm neither scared nor worried it won't work out. I understood that a huge part of my failures in friendships were due to how I was raised by my parents, I mistakenly believed in a lot of the crap my parents made up about friendships because they haven't learned (till this day) to build healthy and reliable connections with people themselves. I'm really excited to dig deep into this matter and learn a little more about something so important to human survival. I guess that's why we need each other after all, for survival, right?

  To help us develop a concept of what friendship is, let's take into consideration what great philosophers have said about it in the past. The Roman orator Cicero said "A Friend Is, As It Were, A Second Self", reading it now makes total sense but a younger me wouldn't get this at all, because having a second self DOES NOT mean having someone to tell you what to do. They might listen with an open heart and serve you with a good piece of their best advice but that's about it and you don't even have to necessarily do what they say because at the end of the day, you are the one who should be calling the shots. I've learned not to lean on friends to rescue me. If you think about it, that's YOUR job not your friends, it will keep you safe from disillusion and frustration. It seems hard to do because it is but hey are relationships supposed to be easy? Answer that question first to understand why you think people are so difficult to deal with and don’t forget you are a person yourself. So people might feel the same way about you too.

  Zeno said "A friend is our alter ego", and I don't know if I agree with that entirely though I get what he is saying. To illustrate I’ll tell you a story that happened when I began to write this article. I'll be changing names for obvious reasons, let's call this friend Meg. So, Meg used to tell me we were like twins, because it seemed like everything that happened to her was also happening to me at the same time and we got caught up in these similar life stories and we began to build this great friendship on the fact that we were meant to be best friends until recently when I realized she tried to project her own feelings and emotional problems onto myself... Yeah so be careful with that kind of friendships 'cause if you don't know who you are you can easily lose yourself. From now on I'll be very vigilant and I won't be calling anyone my twin for a while except if the person is really my biological-long-lost twin who was kidnapped at the hospital and my parents never told me anything to protect my feelings. I mean, you get the point. If nothing, this story showed me how important fighting for our own sense of individuality in any relationship is.

  Lucretius on the other hand put it in a way that best serves what I choose to believe, he said "We are each of us, angels with only one wing, and we can only fly embracing one another", it beautifully describes a healthy and meaningful friendship to me. I believe we're supposed to lift each other up, be supportive in a way that the other person feel secure knowing that somebody is there but more importantly when the time comes to ask for help the person will immediately do so. I don't believe in relationships where only one has to sacrifice or to commit. It takes two to build or to wreck any kind of relationship. So as I see it we are supporters of the people we choose to be so now it is important to understand why we choose them in the first place. Because I’ve seen people come and go in my life and I can totally see a pattern among the people I choose to be friends with.

Models of friendship show that there are two main categories of factors that influence our choice and pursuit of potential friends: individual factors and environmental factors. Individual factors include such influences as approachability, social skills, self-disclosure, similarity, and closeness. Environmental factors include influences such as proximity, geography, activities, and life events. Research continues to support our preferences for friends who we believe to be similar to ourselves and who have personalities that we enjoy being around; choosing friends such as these most likely decreases the possibility for interpersonal conflict.

  We might doubt our ability to make and keep a friend but at the end of the day as I've said before it’s not only your job to do so. See friends as you see the flowers in your garden, you’ve got a couple of things to do to keep them alive and healthy like watering them often and the same applies to your friends. Talk often, be vulnerable when you feel like it, call them at 3a.m in the morning for advice, plan to do something crazy together but also do nothing together and most importantly respect each other individual journey. This generation has so many tools to keep in contact with thousands of people and yet the statistics say people are becoming more depressed and lonely. Stay true to what you believe in and understand that you’ve gotta follow your own path, friends will follow or they will go away but if you spend your days at mercy of what people expect you to do you won’t have friends but bosses. We give love, support and comprehension as friends but remember it is a two-way street darling if it's not working out for the both of you, you can always make new friends, ending a friendship shouldn't be a dramatic experience, just like breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend shouldn't as well, sometimes things just don't work out, plain and simple. But when it does, it's so much fun!

Thanks for reading guys!

Talk to y’all next time.

Douglas Migliassi