Taking Stock Of Your Friendships

I was going thru my email and I came across this article I had sent out to a few people I considered friends a few years back. I had forgot about it, but I found it at the right time. When I tell you God works in Mysterious ways...I really needed to read this...so I though why not post it to your blog somebody else my need it too..

I believe that a person’s life is largely defined by the bonds they have made with the people around them, be it siblings, parents, children, co-workers or friends, the relationships and connections you form with those around you are very important. Those relationships either make you a better person and help to sustain you, or they can bring negative energy to your life.

Sometimes you need to take a look at your relationships with your friends and ask yourself if you are still getting what you need from them. Have your friendships grown with you? A major life change may have put you on this path of reflection and prompted a re-evaluation of your friendships -- maybe you got married, had a child, or moved. Maybe the re-evaluation was prompted by changes in your friends’ behavior. Did they stop calling you or inviting you out? If you are feeling like you are being treated differently, you can’t understand why, and it bothers you, those are probably clues that it’s time to re-evaluate a friendship.
This is often difficult to do since it gets harder to make new friends as we get older, we either hang on to the ones we have (come hell or high water) or when we do let a friendship go, we usually don’t replace the friend, shrinking our inner circle. We’re more likely to do relationship inventory when it comes to our romantic life, but it is equally important, if not more so, to do it when it comes to our friendships. After all, friendships stand the test of time more often than romantic relationships do.

When our inner circles shrink, we might realize that the friendships we made in your youth were not necessarily formed out of common interests or shared goals. In our youth we might have gravitated towards the people who were around us, simply because they were there. As we grow and really discover who we are, we might realize our friendship wasn’t built on anything substantive which may make it harder to maintain. A person you once felt comfortable sharing most things with you might not necessarily trust with your feelings anymore. Someone you felt you could talk to openly about everything, may become the person you feel judges you the most.
Whatever scenario you might be experiencing the bottom line is people change and the relationships surrounding those people do to. It doesn’t mean that you will no longer be friends with your girl from the 3rd grade; it just means that you will have a different type of friendship with her. For better or worse, all things do happen for a reason. You realize things about yourself, you realize things about the world around you, but most importantly you realize that although it may be hard to make new friends keeping a network of support is something every woman should have in her arsenal. Life is too tricky to navigate without a support system!
Here are some suggestions to help you get the most out of your friendships:


1.If you start seeing tell tale signs of a friendship going in the wrong direction, don’t ignore them! Those are your re-evaluation indicators. Brushing things under the rug only leads to more complications. Address the issues early on by starting with a simple conversation (in the medium of your choosing) and going from there. The worse thing you can do is to let something that bothers you fester, it just makes it worse, it builds inside of you, and then you explode.

2. Leave a paper trail! Make a list of everyone you have considered a friend over the past few years and rank where your relationship with each person stands. Are you happy with it? Maybe you don’t talk to someone as much as you used to but you actually prefer it that way. Be honest with yourself about where folks stand with you.

3. Make a goal for each friend. Do you want to spend more time with a particular person? Is there someone you think is cool but haven’t invested the time in getting to know better? What do you hope to accomplish with each friendship?

4. Different friends have different purposes. You can have hang out friends, workout friends, book club friends, friends you travel with, and bare-your-soul to friends. We are past the stage in our lives where the same women need to fulfill all of those roles. Men are quite good at having different boys for different things so we need to take a page from their book.

5. Think about how you have changed and how that has contributed to the changes in other parts of your life. If the changes you have made with yourself make you happy and you want them to continue, the changes in your other relationships will follow suit.

6. Sometimes a friendship does need to end but people aren’t always honest enough to express that. This is usually when you see the change in behavior patterns. Saying ‘I don’t see the point in being friends anymore’ or ‘let’s take a break from this friendship’ might be very hard to verbalize (especially if you have known someone for a very long time). You get used to having certain people around, which is normal, but it is much better to let a friendship go than to treat someone you have shared so much history with in hurtful or inappropriate ways.

7. Just because a friendship has to end, doesn’t mean that it has to end badly. You can go your separate ways and know that you will always love that friend and that for a period of your life they were the constant that made things better when you were down and out.

8. Sometimes things are cyclical, there is a reason and a season for everything. Just because a specific friendship withered away doesn’t mean that it won’t bloom again. You might just really need a break. Like all things in life, if it is meant to be, it will be and if it isn’t then it was good that relationship ended.

9. Try to remember that sometimes the changes in your relationships may not even be specifically about you. Your presence might remind someone of a bad time period in their life, one they would rather forget. In order to leave those memories in the past and to move on with their future, it might be easier or better for that person to stop associating with you. If a part of someone’s happiness is predicated on letting go of the weaker times in their life and that means you too, be happy that they are a stronger, happier, more confident person and move on.

10. Don’t get stuck in your own stuff! Sometimes we get so caught up in our own feelings, it is hard for us to think through someone else’s feelings. Being able to process how your words and actions make other people feel will not only make you a better friend, but a better person.


The importance of positivity in your relationships is the number one goal in all of this. Surround yourself with people who you feel have your best interest at heart. Equally essential, surround yourself with people who know that you have their best interest at heart. You don’t want the negative energy that comes from people who think you are out to do them wrong. If you are friends with someone where your negative feelings about them outweigh the good, let it go. It’s 2009, the perfect time to decide what you want from yourself and those around you. Make your life a happy, peaceful, and prosperous place. Good luck yall