In the age of social networking we are not less on friends, we have hundreds or thousands of friends. Lets understand the value or importance of friendship in the life .
Friends are supposed to be good for Us. In recent years, scientific research has suggested that people who have strong friendships experience less stress, they recover more quickly from heart attacks and they are likely to live longer than the friendless. One interesting study proved people who have strong friends are even less susceptible to the common cold.
Let us understand the Do’s & Don’t of friendship :
How can a friend be bad? Most obviously, by drawing a person into criminal or otherwise ill-advised pursuit.
Betrayal also makes for a bad friendship. When friends split up, it is often in cases where one has shared personal information or secrets that the other one wanted to be kept confidential.
Another form of betrayal, is when a friend suddenly turns cold, without ever explaining why. It’s more than just pulling away, The silent treatment is actually malicious.
A third type of bad friendship involves someone who insults the other person,
Emotional abuse may be less noticeable than verbal abuse, but it is more insidious. Some people constantly set up their friends, she explained. They’ll have a party, not invite the friend, but make sure he or she finds out.
Risk takers, betrayers and abusers are the most extreme kinds of bad friends, but they are not the only ones. Occupying the second tier of badness are the liar, the person who is overly dependent, the friend who never listens, the person who meddles too much in a friend’s life, the competitor and the loner, who prefers not to spend time with friends.
Most common is the promise breaker. This includes everyone from the person who says let’s have a cup of coffee but something always comes up at the last minute to someone who promises to be there for you when you need them, but then isn’t.
Sometimes the mature thing is to lighten up and let something go, she added. It’s also an act of maturity sometimes to accept another person’s limitations.
But if the friendship has deteriorated to the point where one friend truly dislikes the other one or finds that the friendship is causing undue stress, the healthy response is to pull away, to stop sharing the personal or intimate details of life, and start being too busy to get together, ever.
It takes two people to start and maintain a friendship, but only one to end it.
It is wise to pay attention to your friendships and have them in order while you’re healthy and your life and work are going well. Because when a crisis hits, when someone you love dies, or you lose your job , when the universe gives you a crash course in vulnerability, you will discover how crucial and life-preserving good friendship is.
