Friendship Quotes, Meaning, and Trivia

 Friendship is different things to different people.  To me a friendship involves trust, communication, understanding, loyalty, support, empathy, and intimacy.  A true friend is someone you can trust, tell secrets to knowing they will take those secrets to the death, relax and be yourself with, and know so well that their faults are no longer thought of as faults just as idiosyncrasies. 

So how do you build a friendship such as this?  You begin by sharing a bit of yourself.  A private thought or feeling will do.  If the person what to be a friend they will share back.  If they don't, move on, there are many, many people out there that would love to be your friend.  Make sure you pay attention when the other person is sharing.  You need to be there not only physically but you need to make contact, and focus on what the person is saying.

As you become closer you will find there is more talking and sharing.  Remember whatever you two discuss needs to stay between the two of you.  This is the way you build up trust.  You cannot have a friendship without being able to trust the other person to keep your secrets.  The base of friendship is trust and loyalty.

Keep in mind that a friendship does not happen overnight.  Not the true, lasting, lifelong type of friendship.  It takes time to build the intimancy, trust, loyalty, and special communication that makes up this special type of friendship.  I have heard that to build a true lasting friendship it takes at the very least three years.  It seems to me that's pretty accurate.

 I have a friend, let's call her Peggy, that I have been friends with for more years than I want to admit.  We were inseperable, and our children formed strong bonds of friendship that have also lasted through all these years.  Anyway, she and I both were going through divorces and I ended up moving a few hundred miles away.  Because of everything going on in both of our lives we lost touch.

To lose this friendship, or, as I like to think of it, misplace this friendship was a terrible shame.  For many years we were each others support system.  No matter what was happening we both knew the other would be there for the other.  I can't tell you how hard it is to lose or misplace a friendship like this. 

A couple of years go by, I get married, she moves out of the area, and we no longer know where each other is.  Along comes Facebook.  Facebook is a wonderful thing.  It helps you become reaquainted with friends and relatives that you haven't seen or heard from in years.  For us, in the beginning, it really didn't help.  The last names were not the same and it's hard to find someone when you don't know their new last name.  It was our children that found each other and untimately led us to each other.  Both of us were overjoyed.  We wrote back and forth, sent phone numbers and ended up on the phone for hours.  It was like there was no passage of time between the last conversation and this one 17 years later.  I am happy to say this is most definately a lifetime friendship.  If you can pick up the phone and speak to someone after a period of time such as 17 years and talk as though you just talked to them yesterday, this is a true friendship. 

This is a type of friendship I wish for everyone.  To have a friend that you can instintively trust, one that will always be there, someone who understands you and that you understand, well, that's a little slice of heaven.

• Friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it. - Cicero
• We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young. - Letty Cottin Pogrebin
• A friend is more grounding than an anchor or rope. He can make you safe, secure and fill your heart with hope. - Friendship thoughts
• Remember, the greatest gift is not found in a store nor under a tree, but in the hearts of true friends. - Cindy Lew
• It is notwhat you give your friend, but what you are willing to give him that determines the quality of friendship. - Mary Dixon Thayer
• There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine ande spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living. - Don Marguis
• A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely. - Pam Brown
• Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit. - Aristotle
• Friendship is not measured on how long you've been together; not on how much you've given or received; not on how many times you've helped each other. It is on how you value one another. - Friendship thoughts
  
  

• February is International Friendship Month.
• Having friends helps you live longer.
• Winnie - the - Pooh was named as the world's Ambassador of Friendship by the United Nations in 1997.
• If your best friend eats healthy you have better than a 5 to 1 change of eating healthy.
• Friendship bracelets, cards, and gifts have become a poplular way to celebrate friendship day.
• It is  thought that it is the friendship paret of the marriage that makes a marriage last.
• National Friendship day is celebrated on the first Sunday in August in the U.S.
• People with strong friendships and support recover quicker from a serious illness
• The third Sunday in Septembe is Women's Friendship Day.
• Best Friends Day is June 23.
• If you have a good friend at work you are 7 times more likely to enjoy your job.