Friendship: the value of learning to share and trusting others
The link of the friendship tends to provide some satisfaction, emotional support, security, and especially helps us develop a good self esteem.
It helps us, for example, from the feeling of acceptance and appreciation we receive from others; especially, on the part of those people that each one considers as friends.
This is so, because through the friendship We learn to trust and to share, helping us to discover how well we feel helping other people.
And is that when we feel graced by friendship, emotions as unhealthy as distrust or hatred can become tempered by this type of relationship.
How a friendship is forged
Especially with the first meeting between two people, there tends to be a process that can conclude in friendship.
However, we must bear in mind that there are people (especially the most insecure) who think that if in that first encounter friendship does not arise, it is because they have failed, something that as we can imagine, would be far from reality.
In these cases, we must think that, for example, the appropriate circumstances have not yet been given so that a certain friendship can be forged. In any case, the only certain thing at this point is that no one has failed.
Truth and sincerity in friendship
That the friendship relationship implies trust in truth between two people, is nothing new. Nobody would deny that two people who lie, or who are not sincere among them, can not be considered friends, in the strictest sense of the term.
However, in the name of that friendship, should the whole person be told the whole truth? In other words, what is first, friendship or sincerity? Obviously, the answer is not easy, because we have all been confronted with similar situations, sometime in our lives. And, in the end, we have always been left with the bitter feeling that either we have not been frank with our friend, or we have hurt him by telling him the whole truth.
In reality, it is a conflict of values, since in friendship, these two realities are taken for granted, as the fundamental basis that sustains the relationship. However, neither truth nor sincerity can be above love, or charity. The problem arises when we think that beyond the affection that unites two people, is always telling the truth, at any price.
This fallacy entails many problems, since the truth is part of any serious relationship that human beings establish with their peers. However, friends are chosen in another order of realities, where love is the main guarantee of that unity.
The question is very simple, if telling the whole truth in a friendship, implies the pain physical or moral, it is better to abstain, provided that what is hidden is not to the detriment of one's own relationship. The truth does not need intermediaries, but love goes through mediations like respect, time, or maturity, which postpone or hide the truth until it stops hurting.
Advice to open ourselves to friendship
- Do not pretend that a friendship tends to form itself or yes in the so-called "first encounter". Try to be yourself, without expecting anything.
- The previous advice could be comparable to that you do not intend to go too fast, since friendship is something that tends to consolidate with the passage of time.
- There is no such friend who can share your areas of interest, or who can connect with all aspects of your own personality. This type of friends do not exist, since each one is as it is, and we must accept it precisely as it is.
