Maintaining Lasting Friendships

Bamlak Lemma
Good, lasting friendships are not found by accident, but are a product of hard work and self-sacrifice. Many people today find it challenging to maintain lasting friendships. If they worked harder to develop qualities such as loyalty, forgiveness, communication skills, open-mindedness and aimed to find people with similar attributes, when choosing close friends, it would be much easier to maintain lasting friendships.

It is vital that from the beginning, we do not limit ourselves when choosing close companions. Maintaining a lasting friendship is much easier when we choose our friends without being overly judgmental. When looking for a lasting friend, we may tend to look in our own age group. Perhaps we forget this restricts us from finding friends of other ages. In order to build and maintain lasting friendships, we have to come ‘out of the box’ and open ourselves up to people of different age groups, races, cultures and nationalities. For example, if a person is looking for a companion, it would be wise if he or she talks to different types of people instead of being narrow-minded when choosing a friend. In that way, opportunities of finding someone who could be a lasting friend would improve.

Moreover, maintaining a lasting friendship also requires an ability to communicate well. Although many find it funny to tease or humiliate friends as a joke, it is important to consider the consequences of pushing friends to their limit. No one would ever want to stay close friends with someone who brings him or her down. Thus, it is crucial that we use their words to show respect and support towards our friends at all times.

Good communication also involves the ability to listen well. If we show our friends we are interested in what they have to say, they will, in turn, recognise we value their opinion, even when we do not necessarily agree with it.

Additionally, we cannot expect our friends to be perfect. Since everyone makes mistakes from time to time, it is reasonable we expect that our friends will occasionally disappoint us. In order to maintain a lasting friendship, forgiveness is required. Many people today expect friendships to always be buoyant, due to what they see or hear from the media but this is not always what happens in reality. Many friends will face challenges in their friendship as time passes. Therefore, we need to be forgiving and understanding at all times. We need to show our friends we are not merciless, but rather are able to continue to love them, even when disappointed by them.

Once people start building a friendship, it is important that they show loyalty and the sense of goodwill to their friends. That means that we develop a strong feeling of allegiance with our friends and by doing so show ourselves as trustworthy. Since this takes time and requires an enormous amount of effort, we must always ensure we consistently show support through both good and bad times. Loyalty also plays a big role when it comes to showing affection towards a friend. If we are loyal to a friend, it can usually be seen in what we do and say. We show support by watching a friend’s basketball game or visiting a friend that is in the hospital.

The efforts made at being non-judgmental when choosing close friends, fostering qualities such as loyalty, forgiveness and communicating well can help maintain lasting friendships. Those few steps, when properly implemented, can benefit friendships and resolve conflicts between friends.