LifestyleRelationships

Dealing With Friendship Conflicts: Friendship Breakups

Sometimes, having a close friendship can feel as close as family. However, similar to the family, maintaining the relationships takes work and commitment. By doing things together, making memories, spending time with each other, supporting each other, and reciprocating each other, you can surely build a lifelong friendship. When it comes to our physical and mental health, friendship is truly the best medicine for a person. A study showed that having strong social networks and having great friends may lengthen survival in elderly men and women, with best friends being even more likely to increase longevity than close family members.

 

Why Are Friends So Important?

In our Indian Society, people tend to place more emphasis on romantic relationships. We think that just finding that right person, be it a boy or a girl, will make you happy and fulfilled but research shows that friends are actually even more important to our psychological welfare than having a life partner. In my opinion, friends bring more happiness into our lives than virtually anything else.

Good friends relieve mental stress, provide you comfort and joy, and prevent loneliness and isolation when you feel it. Lack of good social connection may lead to a sedentary lifestyle. Friends are even tied to longevity.

But close friendships don’t just happen easily, many of us struggle to meet people and develop quality connections with them ( If you have one, never lose that person ever in your life). Whatever be your age or the circumstances, it’s never late to make new friends, reconnecting with old ones, and greatly improve your social life, emotional health, and overall well-being. Go out, find people with common interests, spend time with people, I believe you will surely find that one person.

What Makes A Friendship Break Up?

It can happen that a few times, something in life can cause you to lose friends, and you can’t do anything about it. Circumstances like having new friends, moving far, new family obligations (think marriage/kids), or maybe even work-related issues that can cause you to socialize less often with your friends.

Another reason why you might break up with your friend is unresolved conflicts between you and your friend. One of you did something and refused to apologize Or maybe you just disagree on whose fault it is. Sometimes, it’s plain jealousy between friends or the feeling of getting less priority and time from each other, is that you start to have less and less in common. You both feel less and less of a drive to hang out or take another person and their efforts for granted.

There is sometimes a difference between how much “space” you both need in the friendship and how much the other person wants from you. If they’re too different, it can be tough to maintain that friendship. One friend might want to share a lot of activities and maybe share all their secrets, while the other one wants to be less involved with that person.

 

For Better Friendships, Try To Be A Better Friend Yourself

Friendships take time to form and even more, it takes a lot of time to deepen, so you should always nurture that new connection and try to maintain it, as differences come in every relationship but it depends on how you tackle with it. If you try to avoid it or just don’t take it seriously, you are surely going to lose the friendship soon. Try to understand the other person and their expectations and even if you can’t fulfill it, you can always make that person understand it rather than doing nothing.

Treat your friend or actually everyone just as you want them to treat you. Be reliable, thoughtful, trustworthy, and willing to share yourself and your time with each other. Always listen to and support your friend just as you want them to listen to and support you whenever you need them.

Understand that you’re both unique individuals so your friendship probably won’t develop exactly as you expect to, no one is perfect and every friend will make mistakes but you should learn to forget and forgive. According to me, no friendship develops smoothly so when there’s a bump in the road, try to find a way from the side to overcome the problem and move on. It will often deepen the bond between both of you.

Deal With Friendship Conflicts, It’s Worth The Temporary Pain

Managing conflicts in a friendship is a vital skill that everyone should have because it’s the best of friendships that are likely to hit a bump in the road as I said previously. If you don’t resolve the conflict, you might lose that very dear friend.

Whether it’s between you and someone else, or even if between two of your friends, try and resolve conflicts without too much judgment, it is the best thing to do. The key to that is to take each person’s perspective into consideration, that’s very important. Each person needs to share how they see the conflict, from their own place rather than just listening to another person.

Once everyone shares their own perspective, each one can at least see some validity in their friends’ grievance. You should always “get” why the other person did what they did.

After that, you want each person to see that the other person didn’t intentionally hurt them, you need them to see how the friendship is more important than that one incident for the conflict. That’s how they see the bigger picture, apologize to each other and move on mutually.

I hope and also know that everyone has that one special and the most important person in their life and having distances can hurt both of you. In the end, I would say that always try to maintain the relationships and even if you don’t feel responsible for the problems, have temporary pain and try to apologize because in the long term you will always regret the decision to be apart and miss each other and that pain will surely be more painful.

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