I have the best friends in the world and I firmly believe that. They will never be perfect, but if you do it right, you should absolutely believe that you couldn’t be luckier.
Somehow or another, I’ve always been extremely lucky in finding friends that became my family. I’ve often wondered how I’ve gotten so lucky. While I do think that a lot of my luck came straight from the blessings of God’s hands, I’ve realized lately that my own attitude has had a lot to do with my successful friendships.
I consider myself to be a pretty positive person. I’m not always positive, as that would be unrealistic and not very endearing if I said I were, but for the most part, I think that I strive to be positive in mind and spirit. I don’t think badly of most people that I know and it's because of the attitude I’ve taken on about the people I meet.
To befriend someone, I believe that you should develop a habit of immediately looking for the good in that person. Inevitably, you will find some negative qualities in that person. However, you should train your subconscious to perform a trick that could help you make friends and help you keep them. My advice: whenever you find a negative quality in a person, before it ever develops into a full thought, your subconscious should push it into the back of your mind and forget that it ever existed.
If you aren’t in that habit already, it’ll take some practice. Trust me.
Ever had a friend that you liked with the exception of just a few annoying qualities? What happened when you opened your mouth about this friend behind his or her back? Like a plague, that little annoyance, once no longer quarantined, will spread throughout every inch of your body. If you continue to rant unnecessarily, it will spread until just looking at that person drives you insane.
Doing this can be incredibly damaging to your relationship with a friend, but doing the opposite can also strengthen your friendship immensely. From the beginning, find what you like about a person. It could be that you both have a great deal in common; you like how funny he or she is, or simply the way in which he or she greets you. You will learn to love everyone so much more as your relationships progress than you otherwise would.
None of my friends are perfect, and I’d be silly if I thought that they were. But I know that I chose them for a reason, and as a loyal friend, it is my job to love them and forget those petty things that aren’t my favorite things about them, but accepting that these are things that I cannot change.
I’m not saying this is fool proof or that it always works out in your favor, because it doesn’t. Sometimes, you can only push so much before the negative qualities you’re looking past begin to overflow. At this point, you might finally snap, realizing that that person just really is a bad egg and there is nothing that you can do about it.
Still, people like this should not walk into your life everyday. It should be a rarity that you find someone this toxic. Most flaws in your friends should not matter enough to ruin a friendship or your feelings. If they're that detrimental to your well-being, it might benefit you to nix them from your life.
It is also okay to vent occasionally. Sometimes, even though you love a friend of yours a whole lot, he or she might just say something that really rubs you the wrong way. It’s part of friendship. Not every hurtful thing should be brought up, as starting an argument over everything can also damage a friendship. However, finding a trustworthy soul (mom, dad, sibling or a party completely unrelated to the subject at hand) to vent to about a situation could relieve your feelings without harming the other party.
To sum it up, just be positive. Accept your friends for who they are. Understand that they have flaws, and while they might sometimes annoy you, it is important to love them through it all. No matter what.
That is how you make friends for life, at least, that’s how I’ve done it and it seems to have worked out pretty nicely so far.
