To give some preface to this article, I should establish my credibility as to why I believe the friends we surround ourselves with are (metaphorically speaking of course) our families.

I was an only-child up to my knowledge until I was eight years old and met my sister for the first time. (A story for another day) I had been involved in several activities in, and out of schools like sports, Cub Scouts, and different clubs as well. I was very reliant on my friendships conceived in these affairs because it gave me a sense of community that I, and any child for that matter, desperately needs to feel in order to build good team-building, and skill-sharing tendencies for the rest of one’s life.

My entire life I was in a household with just my mother, and myself. Due to the necessity of bills being paid, my mom wasn’t always available for advice or lessons that I acquired through friendships.

The reason why I decided to muse on this topic is that as I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate the friendships and bonds I have grown to love in my work, social, and extra-curricular life. As we all grow older I believe we fulfill our potential to understand those that will have a more permanent and long-lasting role, versus those that we may not be so fortunate as to have in our lives for the majority of our journeys.

Friends can be seen as a family unit through one’s eyes for a variety of reasons. Friendships create bonds between people that foster advice, love, common interests, and relationships between humans. We need friendships for the same reasons we need to work, or we need family they create communities for us to understand our value and create a sense of purpose and a common unit to work for the betterment of.

Friendships are also unique in how they create a sense of community not always found in family units.

Friendships can be extremely useful in diffusing family situations we might find ourselves in without our own doing. Friendships can be useful in this aspect because they provide an outside perspective that redacts any emotional reasoning we may find in our own logic to come to a conclusion for a means to an end when it comes to our own personal affairs. On top of this, a good friend can understand when a relationship with a family member, person, or activity is beneficial or harmful to our health and behavior in day-to-day activity.

I can look back several times over at my true friends looking out for me, providing advice on how I should handle a situation, or if my homework was correct or not, and vice versa. Our friends are the ones we have as our grooms and maids of honor at our weddings. Our friends are the ones we share our deepest secrets, and regrets with. They lift us up when we need encouragement and provide constructive criticism when things get too zany. They provide a diverse community every person needs to thrive and be the best selves they can be.

A perfect example of what it means to be a friend can be thought of by anyone with a good friend group around them, however I do want to challenge anyone who immediately thought of what it meant to be to be a friend when you read the aforementioned statement. Without pontificating on the subject of whether or not you would do this for certain distant family members or not, decipher what differences there are between how we would take care and look after those that we find ourselves coincidentally related to, versus those we have close, long-lasting friendships with. The differences between the two are non-existent for myself, and minutiae for most.