On The Importance of Good Friends

A few months ago, I left my job to work on Unfinished Man full time. This extra time gave me an opportunity to really sit back and reflect on my life, and decide what’s important to me. One area I thought a lot about was my friendships. I knew that I had good friends, but I didn’t really know what made them good friends. In typical organizational-freak-manner, I started to write a list. I wrote out all the qualities that I felt were important to me in a friendship. A week later I was satisfied with what I wrote, saved it, and mostly forgot about it… until last night. 

After celebrating my birthday with my girlfriend and a group of close friends, I headed home on the train after a night well spent. I sat talking to my girlfriend and a buddy of mine, and as the train neared a station, a fellow and his pals grabbed my friend’s phone and ran. I could list out the entire account in detail, but needless to say, this resulted in a fight of the punching variety. It was the first (and hopefully last) fight I’ll ever have to deal with, but it made me think about the list that I wrote so many months ago. It made me realize, in a very real and non-abstract way, just how important good friends are. There’s a saying that you only judge a person’s true character after a fight, and I think that’s true. Knowing that your friend will stand up for you no matter the odds is a great feeling, and perhaps a rare quality. If you have friends like this, cherish them. If you don’t, do everything you can to find them.

Having friends who will support you is important, but it’s just one aspect of friendship, and I encourage you to give this area of your life some thought. People come and go, and sometimes it’s easy to neglect the friends most important to you. If you know what makes your friends so special to you, perhaps you’ll work that much harder to keep them.

(Photo: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)