What I’ve Learned About Friendship Within The Past Few Years

I’ve been reflecting on friendship a great deal this year: The absence of friendship, lessons learned from misaligned friendships, how to build community, and how to break old cycles so that I can have the intimate relationships I desire and deserve.

Lighting my path forward into building positive, strong relationships in my life is a continual process for me.

It’s something I journal about, and engage with in therapy, a lot. In light of my prior post on offering remedies for lonely women, I’m inspired to share some personal, powerful insights I’ve learned, as I’ve healed and engaged in deep reflection about friendship.

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• Great friendships are foundational for great romantic partnerships.

Although certain qualities you’re seeking in a partner vs. friend may be different, you still have to be just as intentional about which friend you choose to bring into your life, and you need to take care to nurture and grow your friendship over time.

A great romantic partner must also be a great friend, so learning how to choose your friends wisely will help you choose an aligned partner. 

I also think if you want to have a healthy, balanced romantic relationship, you need to make sure you have some great friendships and community in your life, first.

Not only are friendships and community a great way to practice relational skills that you can apply to partnerships, they also provide various sources of human support and social fulfillment in your life, so that you don’t end up dumping all of that responsibility onto a single person. 

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• A friend who doesn’t love herself will not be able to fully show up for you.

No matter how amazing, smart, kindhearted, or (insert x good quality here)…A friend who does not love herself will not be able to fully show up for you as a friend. And she is also likely to hurt and betray you at some point, because that is all she knows how to do for herself, which is the most single most important relationship that she has in her life. It has nothing to do with whether she is a ‘good’ person or not. It is what it is.

Self-love is a lifelong practice that we have to choose each day, in various moments of our daily lives. Practice is not about perfection, but it is about devotion. Someone who is not in the practice of self-love, and who is actively engaging in self-destructive behaviors and thoughts—is never going to  be able to engage in a healthy, loving relationship or fully show up for you, even if you like each other and share a genuine bond.

The other piece to this, is that it’s important for you to to be in the practice of loving yourself, so that you can practice discernment and position yourself to see the other person clearly. It’s impossible to discern where someone else is at, when you’re seeing through foggy glasses. 

Love begets love.

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• I need to position myself to have the type of friendship I want and deserve.

 There are some points in our lives when we may want to have a friend or partner, but we need to work on some things within ourselves and our lives in order to hold space for that relationship.

Those things might be emotional skillsets to become healthy-minded, so that you can be a better friend to someone else, and attract the right kind of person.

Or, they could be structural things, like moving to a city or town where you can meet more kindred spirits, or quitting a job or partnership that drains all of your energy and leaves you with little space to nurture positive relationship with yourself and others. Some of us live as a shell of ourselves, wearing a proverbial mask, hiding who we really are—and so we attract other inauthentic people who don’t truly love us.

There could be a myriad of things, but case in point is—great, deeply aligned relationships don’t just fall from the sky and land in your lap, and magically stay there forever. Especially as adults, they require intention to attract and sustain.

I’ve had to take a good hard look at my life and pinpoint the areas why I haven’t been able to find the lasting friendships I desire and deserve—and work on those things, accordingly. It’s a slow process, but it’s a major part of what has helped me heal my chronic loneliness. 

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• You don’t just “find” your people, you attract them.

You vibrate on a frequency that magnetizes others to you. Finding your people is about carrying yourself through the world in a way that is fully authentic. 

I would take it a step further and say that loving who you are, allows you to attract people into your life who not only vibe with you, but who are also able to love you in a wholesome way that amplifies how you feel about yourself. You’ll attract people who can trust that you’re capable of loving them in the way they deserve to be loved, too. 

Everything is energy, and energy never lies. You can’t fake it, and you can’t hide it behind clothes, sunglasses, fancy words, identities, titles, awards, or six pack abs. People try to overcompensate through these things all the time because they think it will make them more lovable, and it never leads to happiness or health. 

The best way to find your people is by enhancing your unique attractiveness, which is derived from healing, enhancing the quality of energy you carry, and living a life that is in full alignment with the values and interests you gain through that process. 

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• The more I heal and love myself, I realize that the people I am truly compatible with for an intimate relationship are rare. I need to respect that, and preserve my energy accordingly. 

I can be a Social butterfly, when I want to be. I have the ability to connect with people from various walks of life, and it’s easy for me to get along with different types of people, at the outset.

Historically, and especially in times of deep, longstanding loneliness, that ease of connection has manifested through me over-giving my energy to people who were not compatible with me, and falling into friendships that drained me, that never felt quite right, and that were not built to last.

Befriending people regardless of compatibility was a survival mechanism for me, in times of deep isolation. It also revealed an entire emotional skillset that I hadn’t yet learned. Healing has required me to step out of survival mode and move towards what and who will feed my soul in the long run.

A major part of respecting myself and the energy I carry, is preserving it for those who can fully hold space for all of me, and offer the sort of mutuality that can nurture me as a whole person. 

Even if I am at a place in my life where I don’t have any friends, it’s better to preserve my valuable energy for myself, while I open up new avenues to connect with others in healthy ways, rather than sharing my presence with misaligned people and spaces. 

I have worked hard to be who I am, and to embody the natural wisdom I carry. It’s also taken a lot of courage and inner-work for me to stand strong in things that are not supported by this culture, such as sobriety, or standing up for women. 

There are a lot of people who are drawn to me because of the light I carry, but they don’t really understand why I have this light, and they are not holistically at a place within themselves to support me in keeping my flame burning in the form of a close relationship. 

I recognize that my ability to really ‘sit with’ people and go deep is a gift, but I need to channel it properly, and in a way that truly honors me. And I need to love myself enough to trust that the right people will show up in my life, as I continue to show up for myself. 

This is still something I am working on, but I am so proud of myself for how far I’ve come.

💜