Friends can’t be put on a shelf and they aren’t a part of a collection.
For many of us, growing into adulthood often means weeding out toxic relationships, and unfortunately, that usually includes toxic friendships too. When we begin to grow up, we grow out of the party mentality that we held onto in our younger years.
Rather than seeking as many friends as possible so we’ll always have somebody to hang out with on a Friday night, we seek genuine relationships with a select group of people because we know quality will always beat quantity when it comes to friendship.
We don’t use our friends to simply vent about our problems.
When you do need to unload on a friend, it’s because this friend knows you, they know your history, and they have a valuable view to contribute. In our formative years, it’s very easy to seek out acquaintances simply so we will have somebody to dish about our boy problems.
However, as we progress through life, we begin to learn that we know ourselves best and if it isn’t us, then it’s our closest friends (or just friend) who will give us valuable perspective.
Your friends are not props for social media.
Scrolling through social media makes it easy to become jealous of our acquaintance’s lives. We get a weird little ego boost upon hitting that “eleventh like” on Instagram. We get a thrill when somebody retweets a joke we spent too long thinking up. But those 600 Facebook friends are not real friends and they do not care about what you’re doing.
Are your favorite memories the ones you spent racking up likes while staring at a computer screen? I hope they aren’t. Try to avoid living for the likes and don’t use your friends for them either.
Acquaintances are easy to find, while friends require work.
You don’t walk into a store, try on just one pair of shoes and buy them. Why would you do the same with your friends. Friendship requires work and often we must try on quite a few acquaintances before we truly find a good friend.
Being an acquaintance is effortless. Being a friend is hard. It’s easy to pass a friend at the street or run into them at the gym and make plans to “catch up” that neither of you follow through on. Acquaintances are the ones who Snapchat you a picture of themselves doing cool things. Friends are the ones who do cool things with you.
[Featured Image Credit: FRIENDS]