Friendship - Something about relationships and how to keep them healthy

Generating a true and lasting friendship is a slow process, identifying it commonly occurs long-term, with rare exceptions, and most of it has aspects beyond our "control" that contribute to the strengthening of this beautiful relationship.

If generate and identify such level of relationship requires time, effort, patience, compassion, love, space, respect, tolerance (...and many others), losing it is unfortunate and relatively easy, requiring much less from us and occurs more quickly. In most cases, it can occur through bad communications, lack of proper conversation, but yet there is an intriguing and influential destructive factor: be led by others' poison covered conversations, malicious comments, prejudices thrown by envious and jealous toxic individuals, or both.

If in a social and familiar spheres, maintaining these friendships requires special care, in professional environments, more than the academic, that tightens a little more. Mixing professional with personal life is dangerous, things like: unloading daily routine problems in someone who has nothing to do with it, or even, risk a friendship influenced and led by the authority of a hierarchical positions.

Surely sometimes we're gonna face some disappointments, and discover things we hope we would never ever knew or witness and then they happen, but remind it, we deal with people everyday, different people with a wide variety of personalities, some will easily become our friends and be close by, while some just wont (want/like/love/care about/need you).

We should not waste those valuable friendships, depreciate by level of affinity and / or affectivity, nor use as a bargaining chip for little, for nothing. Don't accumulate them merely for what they can give you in return, they are not disposable like a plastic cup of any party, they are no note of money, not even your credit card. Each of these people has something special and certainly did not cross our paths by mere coincidence, it is those friends that keeps a more brotherly relationship, the ones who will be with us in the best, the worst and the hardest moments of our lives.

Here goes some final hints and tips in order to maintain a careful, healthy, happy and lasting friendship: if you realize that something is not going well wit someone else close to you, stop for a while, reflect and ask that specific person for a time, alone (preferably), come clean, give him/her a space, listen first to the their side of the story, talk and undo any misunderstanding, if necessary, apologize and/or release forgiveness, better settle in today, because tomorrow we actually can not guarantee. Life is too short to waste friends for silly unsolved issues.

"[...]Keep smilin' keep shinin' / Knowing you can always count on me for sure / That's what friends are for / For good times and bad times / I'll be on your side forever more / That's what friends are for [...]" -  That's what friends are for - Dionne Warwick

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity. -  Proverbs 17.17