Friendships Among Women - Improving Friendships

Today we will start look at 5 tips that will improve your friendships. We will focus on one each day because each is a post in itself.

As I write these tips I do want to make note of the personality aspect of friendship. This is a link to my personality post to help you understand what your unique personality is. Go to http://kathysthots.blogspot.com/2009/06/four-basic-personality-types.html

I do want to clarify that some personality types need and do better with less friends than others so as write this I do want to clarify that I am not advocating that everyone has to have 20 friends to be a balanced person. Some personality types do very well with 2 or 3 really close friends and some do really well with 10 or more really close friends. That is just all about how God made us and it is good however that may work for you.

The point of this post is to encourage various types of friendship with other women - always remember some will be closer than others but they all hold great value - these may and probably will include your mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, sis -in -laws, nieces, cousins and any other female family member you can think of because the best kind of family are the ones you actually can call your friends.

So enough about that - Tip Number One:

1. Don't expect one friend to meet all your needs.

In their book, What Every Mom Needs, Elisa Morgan and Carol Kuykendall wrote, "...just as no marriage can meet our every need for intimacy, neither can a single friendship." It is important to realize that one person can not meet all our needs for friendship. When we look to one friend to meet all of our friendship needs we could run the risk of becoming too dependent on that friendship. This could lead to high expectations that we talked about previously that are friendship destroyers. We can become clingy and needy which also will eventually lead to the destruction of most relationships. When these traits begin to be part of a friendship it can suffocate a person allowing no room for the relationship to grow and develop in a healthy manner.

Just like any other relationship in our life, to really keep a friend we must be willing to let her go, giving room to be who she is. Do not hold on too tightly to a friend. We can do this by allowing and developing different types of friendships in our life. You will find that each friend offers something unique that can bring different interests, ways of thinking and expand our world. Having many different friends also allows us to grow in different areas of our personality. While one friend may share an interest and love for reading, another may love to go shopping or have a garden. I have some friends that we are tied together by our love of ministry, some who love to play board games (one of my favorite things to do!), some are family that we have a long rich history together and some we connected long ago over similar circumstances and have since developed a safe and secure friendship that only life's journey together can create.

Each friend offers a different adventure to share.

1 Peter 4:80
"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."