True friends

For the last couple of days I have been thinking about friends and what it takes to be a good one. I have many friends, but only a handful of true friends. Out of curiosity I decided to check out a couple of online sites to see what professionals had to say on the subject.

The first site was www.psychologytoday.com which produced a list of 13 traits they considered necessary to be a true friend. They were: trustworthy, honest, dependable, loyal, trust others, non judgmental, good listener, supportive in good times, supportive in bad times, self-confident, see humor in life and fun to be around. That’s a long list for anyone to follow all the time.

The second site I checked into was www.thrivingfamily.com. Their list was a bit more reasonable listing only 6 traits. They are: trustworthiness, loyalty, compassion, authenticity, acceptance and good listener.

I then decided to sit down with a pen and paper intending to come up with my own list. I had expected it to be rather long. Wrong! It only contained two traits for true friendship which are dependability and honesty. I believe my muse took over at this point and stopped me from writing anything else.

Focusing on the words dependability and honesty I began making a mental list of people who have proved to be true friends over time. They absolutely all fit! I can always depend on them if I truly need help or advice and even if we disagree about something we allow each other to express our side of the debate.

In recent years I have had the experience of surviving a relationship with a soul who I am certain is as close to a spiritual partner as anyone could ever be. Some people might call that a soulmate, but I am just going to leave it at Universal partner. Even though this person and I had a special kind of relationship it never could have evolved to a true friendship. Why you may ask? He simply did not meet my personal criteria of dependability and honesty.

Today I believe the purpose of this relationship was to provide a mirror for one or both of us to gain better vision of where our lives were going. Even though to this day the experience still causes tears I am grateful to have survived and hopefully learned from the many lessons it offered.