Elements of a True Friendship

          As I spend this day, Friday, I come to think of the many forms of relationship that I have in my life. Then I realised that I am such a lucky person since all throughout my life, I have established friendships with different kinds of people and lucky enough then to have maintained that friendship with them. 

          How about you, can you count through your fingers the friends that you have in your life? Can you claim one friendship that would last forever? Basically, every human being is so complex that it goes beyond eternity to fully comprehend one human person. All throughout the years, our personality becomes moulded by various factors such as upbringings, genes, environment, friendships etc.. Yes, it is very true that our friends make so much impact in our life that without our knowledge, our ways of dealing with others have been influenced by them anymore. 

          How then could we establish a lasting friendship? To answer such question, we could think of numerous factors such as presence, availability, understanding and trust. In fact, there are others that we can think of yet I just would like to focus on these shared items as my most essential ones so as to maintain and sustain a long and lasting friendship. 

A short elaboration for them would be as follows:

a. presence- what makes a friendship lasts is when both friends are generous in sharing his presence with the other party. And this is true not just on rainy days but holds true on days with stormy weathers. On the other hand, this never limits as well on a mere physical presence but somehow, the presence here is the quality one meaning it is being physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually present with the other person.

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b. availability- similar to presence, availability means that in spite of our day to day obligations, duties, schedules, priorities etc., we should still be able to make ourselves available to our friends. As commonly stated, if we truly value our friendship with others, we should also learn to make ourselves available to cherish the friendship.

c. understanding- in any relationship like friendship, the trait of understanding should be developed, practiced and nurtured. Being able to completely understand the other person is rather a challenging task since we carry along with us our different idiosyncrasies and at times, some of these are challenging for others. However, when we truly consider any friend as a real friend, we subsequently are ready to accept everything on him both his positive and negative characteristics. 

d. the last but not the least on my list, the trust element- an important ingredient that goes along with the ones beforehand, trust is considered as very worthwhile since it measured the level of the established friendship. With a true friend, one can be assured that trust is present and that whatever is shared between the two friends are secured and kept hidden just between both parties. The development of trust takes a while thus the moment that it is destroyed, it is burdensome to repair it. 

Hence with all these elements, can you consider yourself now as one true friend? Lucky you are if you can and lucky your friends for having you as one true friend.