You meet someone you have something in common with and you discover meeting points. Maybe you get excited about this person. Friendships grow over time. They grow through sharing vulnerability, through opening up and revealing yourselves, when it is safe and appropriate to do so. Shared experiences bring you closer together, deepen the relationship. Friendships grow through compassion, through shared passions and through suffering together – through being real, through shared emotions and through sharing, warts and all.
True friendship grows through acceptance of the other person’s humanness, their frailties and weaknesses. If your expectations and excitement are high at the beginning, you may feel disappointed and let down by the other person’s limitations. Then you have choices. You can reject the friendship as unsuitable or inadequate for your personal needs. You can accept their limitations, weighing them up against the benefits of the friendship, allowing for the ups and downs of any relationship.
Or you can deny these limitations in true codependent style and then resent the other person, that is, continue to use them to meet what needs they can, even when you don’t like them. So you cling to a friendship that is not genuine. This is not true friendship. It will not grow and deepen if you are not honest and open – with yourself and the other person. You will not be able to be your real self in this relationship. You will never feel completely comfortable. You will not taste the magic of true intimacy in friendship.
Some people you meet may never become true friends. They may remain acquaintances, and that’s OK. It takes time and energy and ‘bothering’ to nurture true friendship. In reality, more than a handful of true friends is probably unrealistic and unmanageable.
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