“choose friends who pour oil on your passions, and water on your fears”

I’m not sure who first said this quote. I’ve probably butchered it a little but I think I’ve grabbed the essence of it. The older I’ve got the more important friendships have become but ironically, or perhaps its entirely related, they have been increasingly hard to manage.

Maybe its a time thing, an age thing, or we’ve just had longer to annoy people, but it seems to be a common theme when I look around me. We seem to find it very difficult to find, develop, nurture and grow friendships. Here are a few reasons why;

• Our expectations are often too high – I think we often place unrealistic expectations on many of our friendships. We expect friends to magically know what he need and when we require it. This often leads to disappointments that didn’t need to exist.
• We don’t always communicate – I don’t know it this is a cultural thing to my area or not but too often we don’t actually communicate what we are feeling and processing in our friendships. This is linked to the first point and can add to the frustrations of missed expectations.
• We can harbour jealousy and expect exclusivity – I know it sounds like playground stuff but I see it at play with adults. We watch and see who our friends are hanging with outside of us and we can create virtual lists about who the ‘best’ friend is! This then bleeds into the friendship and because we wont communicate the gap widens.
• Our level of busy-ness – usually as we get older the demands on our lives increase. Our jobs require more of our time, our families (both older and younger) need more attention. Added to that is the fact that our energy reduces! We don’t have the same ability to hang out 5 nights a week until 3:00am
• The changing connections we experience – when we were kids and teens our friendships were often formed through proximity. Who was in our class, who lived on our street etc. As we grew older and became more mobile me opened up our options and the focus was around who we clicked with. If we get married the complications increase. All of a sudden 4 people need to click, not just two. Then it kids come along the complications increase again. You naturally come together with people who are at a similar stage and this gets fused further if the kids get on. All of these changing connections have an effect on the friendship connections we form.

You could probably a lot more reasons but how ever many you find, its worth thinking through and being intentional about how we respond. By nature I am an introvert but I’ve increasingly realised the importance of friends and how they can help us in so many ways. We weren’t designed to be an island.

Who’s pouring water on our fears and oil on our passions today?