“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” – Christopher Robin to Winnie-the-Pooh

Many of us realize that the relationship with our spouse or our beloved one requires constant work and effort, but we rarely think like that about friendship. We believe that the bond that we share with our friends will last forever. But the truth is that friendship is not so different from your love relationships. Many of the same rules still apply. You should trust a person. You should share the same interests. You should spend time together to keep your relationship strong. And you should not take your friends for granted!

If you feel that you are slowly growing apart from your friends or would like to make more friends and maintain long-lasting relationships with them, here are 12 friendship musts that will help you to do that:

1. Let go of expectations. In friendship, just as in your relationship with your beloved, you should accept 100% responsibility for making it work. It is never 50/50, otherwise any genuine friendship quickly turns into a business arrangement, e.g. “I will do something for you, but then you will have to do the same for me”. Stop keeping tabs on who has given most in the friendship and do not expect that your efforts or nice gestures will be appreciated or repaid. You can only become true friends with someone you genuinely like, not with someone that you can benefit from.

2. Invite your friends over for a dinner. If your friends live nearby, invite them for dinner every so often. It does not mean that you have to be a gourmet chef. There are plenty of delicious dishes that you can prepare in just an hour.

3. Get together for a weekend. If your friends live far away, invite them to stay at your place for a few days. Plan this weekend in advance. Decide what you want to see or do together. Nothing brings people closer together than happy memories that they can later share.

4. Give your friends personal presents. Gift cards or money are great gifts that do not require a lot of imagination or effort, but they are just as easily forgotten. I honestly do not remember who gave me gift cards for my last birthday, but I will always treasure a painting that my friend drew especially for me. To me it is the most beautiful piece of artwork that I have ever seen, because she put a piece of her heart in it. If you can, make personal gifts for your friends! It really shows them how much they mean to you and where your priorities are.

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I still remember the time when my parent’s friends would come over without calling or informing us in advance about their visit. They would just knock on the door and stay for a cup of coffee, chatting with my parents and discussing the latest news. Today the idea of someone just showing up on your doorstep sounds at the least strange if not ill-mannered. It has become common courtesy to call your friends a few days or, even better, a week in advance and decide on the time of your next meeting.

The advent of Internet and other technological advances like cell phones and instant messengers should have made our communication easier and more efficient. Which they  have. But they have also changed the ways that we interact with others and in some ways challenged interpersonal communication with our friends.

Now with a push of the button we can “accept” new friends on Facebook and just as easily “delete” them off our friends’ list. Do not get me wrong. Facebook is a wonderful social network that helps us find and get in touch with people we have not seen since grade school. It gives us an opportunity to meet new people from just about any country in the world and learn more about their life and their culture. It allows us to get regular updates from our friends that live far away. But it is only a poor substitute for real face-to-face communication.

You can go through life having 500 friends on Facebook, but only a handful of real friends, who will be there for you no matter what. I believe that we can call ourselves fortunate if we have one to three true genuine friends. Not just acquaintances that we occasionally hang out with and meet for lunch.

To me real friendship is truly God’s gift and one of the most gratifying relationships that we can have with other people. But just as any relationship, friendship takes a lot of time and constant effort to cultivate and maintain.

I have been reading a wonderful book “What’s Worth Knowing” by Wendy Lustbader that offers hard-won wisdom that people gained through seventy, eighty, and ninety-plus years of living. An 89-year old John Caughlan when asked “What advice would you give a young person who is trying to live a good life?” answered without hesitation – Good fortune is having good friends:

“Your family is stuck with you. After you get married, your wife is stuck with you, too. But friends are free to come and go. The ones that stay by your side become treasures. They just plain like you. I’m proud of certain things I’ve done in my life, certain accomplishments. But look at my friends! You can’t just go out and acquire them. You make them. Years go by, and you go through hard times together. It takes some doing. I look around and see how lucky I am to have such fine people in my life.”

I truly wish that when I am almost 90 I can say the same. Unfortunately, maintaining friendships is not as easy for me as it  was only 5-10 years ago. Friends get married, have children, move to a different countries and we slowly grow apart.

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