Maintain Old Friendships
Friendships become richer and more precious with time but they can also grow more complicated. Even if you and your friend have grown apart, it wouldn't hurt to talk to them or pay them a visit over the weekends.
Steps
- Keep in touch! It's pretty tough to maintain a friendship if you never have contact. Even if they live in a different city, give them a call every once in a while.
- Do not allow gaps in your contact to create permanent resentment. Sometimes it is not possible to have regular contact. Try to understand your and your friend's time limitations and don't allow these realities to limit your friendship.
- Allow your old friend to evolve. It is possible to love someone through his or her changes. Although you may not realize it, you've changed too! Just give some time for you and your friend to adjust.
- Respect and learn to appreciate your differences.
- Forgive past disappointments. Do not let past fights rule your relationship. You wouldn't want to get into an argument about what happened two years ago! Don't live in the past, live for what's happening right here and now.
- Adjust your expectations if they are not regularly met. Don't require the best out of others. Like yourself, they're only human. Forgive and forget the little things.
- Regularly and openly express to your friend that you are grateful for the friendship. Don't let your friend feel like he/she is giving his best to you, while all your doing is taking. It's all for one and one for all.
- Make an effort to know, remember, and embrace what and whom else is currently important in your friend's life. Don't cut down the people that your friend loves.
Warnings
- While it is important to hold onto a relationship of value, it is equally important to know when to let go of one that is not.
- It is not always possible or healthy to maintain a friendship.
- While any friendship will, at times, require effort, sacrifice and compromise, it is important to know when these challenges are not worth it. A relationship that is abusive or otherwise detrimental to the well being of either party is decidedly not worth following the steps to maintain.
- When it works for both parties an old friendship is valuable. But it is important to recognize when maintaining a relationship is not beneficial.
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