I have never found anything more important to the growth of my well-being than friendships. I will be talking about my friendships as a child, the heartbreak of having to lose them, and comparing that to the way I value friendships now. So, let’s go back in time to when I was a young child at the age of four.
When I was four years old I found my best friend and he continues to hold that spot to this day. His name is Garrett. When we first met, he was six and I was four, so logically we didn’t get along at all. The way I met him was, my dad was dating a woman named Kristi. He was getting really close to her and saw that Kristi was getting along with my sister and I very well. So, he wanted us to meet the rest of Kristi’s family. The majority of the family was older than us, and only one person was around the same age. That was Garrett. They wanted to get my sister and I to become friends with Garrett so that there would be that connection as well, so my stepmom took on the duty of getting us three together a couple times a week to hang out, and do whatever we wanted. At first there was no connection between us. We all enjoyed doing different things and the age difference played a huge role as well. Garrett and my sister were the same age, only born two days apart actually didn’t get along because they were six and as most six year olds are, girls didn’t get along with boys and vice versa. While I being two years younger, to him I was just the annoying little kid. So, none of us got along at first, but as you probably guessed that didn’t last long. Within a year we all became best friends. We did everything together, Garrett was asking to have sleepovers with me and I asked to have sleepovers with him every weekend. After a while, ...
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...e in the story, his mother did everything she could think of to try and change his mind. She asked the priest to cast out the demons in him, among other things.(Rosa ,545) Because he had chosen that path, I decided that it would be best for me to just not be friends with him anymore. So once again I went through the pain of losing a friend.
I still hang out with my other friends from high school, and I understand the importance of making friends even now. Friendship has always been and quite possibly could always be the most important thing to me and my well-being. I had friends as a kid, but I lost them when I chose wealth instead, but through the grace of God I got those friendships back and learned my lesson in the process. I would never chose the wealthy life if it meant losing the things most important to me ever again, and I hope my story teaches you the same.
Marion Winik’s “What Are Friends For?” expresses the characteristics of friendships and their importance in her existence. Winik begins by stating her theory of how some people can’t contribute as much to a friendship with their characteristic traits, while others can fulfill the friendship. She illustrates the eight friendships she has experienced, categorized as Buddies, Relative Friends, Work Friends, Faraway Friends, Former Friends, Friends You Love to Hate, Hero Friends, and New Friends. In like manner, the friendships that I have experienced agree and contradict with Winik’s categorizations.
Friendship can be debated as both a blessing and a curse; as a necessary part of life to be happy or an unnecessary use of time. Friends can be a source of joy and support, they can be a constant stress and something that brings us down, or anywhere in between. In Book 9 of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses to great lengths what friendship is and how we should go about these relationships. In the short story “Melvin in the Sixth Grade” by Dana Johnson, we see the main character Avery’s struggle to find herself and also find friendship, as well as Melvin’s rejection of the notion that one must have friends.
Friendship is not something that has adapted over time. The desire to seek out and surround ourselves with other human beings, our friends, is in our nature. Philosophers such as Aristotle infer that friendship is a kind of virtue, or implies virtue, and is necessary for living. Nobody would ever choose to live without friends, even if we had all the other good things. The relationship between two very different young boys, Bruno and Shmuel’s in the film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is an example of the everlasting bond of a perfect friendship based upon the goodness of each other.
Friendship plays a crucial role in children’s development (Estell, Jones, Pearl & Van Acker, 2009; Poulin & Chan, 2010) that includes, cognitive, emotional (Scharf, 2013), psychosocial (Betts & Stiller, 2014; McDougall & Hymel, 2007), well-being (Asbjørnslett, Engelsrud & Helseth, 2012), and health (Einberg, Svedberg, Enskär & Nygren, 2015). It is defined as an exchanged and voluntary relationship among two or more children who display attachment and liking towards one another, constantly showing closeness and engaged in shared activities, positive affect and sign of happiness (Hollingsworth & Buysse, 2009). Also, part of the categorization for friendship even for young children are endearment, companionship and mutual liking (Klima & Repetti,
While our parents help and support us while growing, our friends will grow with us. These valuable attachments are cherished and needed, and their emotional embrace will always comfort us. With these friends we enter the world of education, our basis to survive in the outside world.
“The silver friend knows your present and the gold friend knows all of your past dirt and glories. Once in a blue moon there is someone who knows it all, someone who knows and accepts you unconditionally, someone who is there for life.” This is a quote I read once in an article by Jill McCorkle. I wrote it down and posted on my wall. McCorkle’s description of a “gold friend” describes a friendship that I have with a group of girls who mean the world to me.
One of the greatest aspects of one’s life is the friendships made throughout the years. Friends are there to help comfort, laugh with, ward off loneliness, and to build up connections between other people. Amongst these attributes, friends at a young age help children to “build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships (Stout, 2013, para. 14).” However, with the introduction of technology brings along social medi...
When defining friendship it can be explained in numerous of ways. It is most commonly described as the quality or state of being friendly; but, truthfully friendship it far more complex than just a simple expression to one another. It is a relationship that is formed over time that takes much commitment and a leveled compromise with one another to proceed the connection. A friendship can begin from something as common as a mutual interest and form into something life lasting. In order to begin and maintain this correspondence, there will be an urgence for similar interest, honesty, and making time and showing appreciation for one another.
The journey of life follows a predetermined pattern; we evolve from needing influence and guidance to finally reaching that point where our lives are up to us. I consider myself very lucky up to this point in my journey. Some people become sidetracked and wind up on a far different course than initially planned, but the detours I made have only assisted in embellishing the individual instead of devouring it.
In studying friendship through the lense of philosophy and philosophers, specifically Aristotle and Grunebaum, there’s been a lot of discussion about the ‘how’s and ‘what’s and ‘why’s of friendship-- what is a perfect friendship, and what is it based on? Why are friendships that focus on pleasantness or usefulness imperfect? Why do we feel obligations to our friends that we don’t feel to other people? We’ve had these questions answered-- a perfect friendship is, according to Aristotle, one based on the ‘virtuous’ qualities of both people-- ‘virtuous’, in this context, meaning the balance, the middle ground between excess and deficit. Pleasant friendships are ones that are only fun, no content, and useful friendships are ones where the parties just use each other for their possessions. Grunebaum told us that people believe they are more obligated to be good to their friends, rather than strangers, because there is more risk involved in treating those close to you unfairly. However, a question still lingers: why, exactly, do we befriend who we do? No matter if the friendship is perfect, useful, or pleasant, there must be more behind it, right? What makes us decide that a person will be good to have in our lives? It comes down
When you’re young, you don’t care about how a person looks or acts, they’re just people, friends. Growing up, you’ll find that qualities a friend has to have or can’t have become very important. It took a special kind of friend to show me that the true heart of a person is what really counts.
The idea of meeting someone special for the first time is always portrayed as the most beautifully fated incident whether in books or movies. When I met my best friend for the first time, we didn’t bump into each other with papers from our books flying majestically in the air and we didn’t have a staring contest in the middle of a crowded hallway. We also certainly didn’t think we would end up being friends, let alone inseparably close to each other.
Growing up in school you have your friends in 1st, then in Jr. High, and then when you get to high school you might not even know or see your friends from 1st grade anymore. For the few people who’s had a friend from 1st grade till college I think that someone they need to hold on to because if they stuck with you through all them year I know they’re there for the right reason and there not just there for a season. As Elizabeth Dunphy says, “It’s the little things that matter, that add up in the end, with the priceless thrilling magic found only in a friend.”
Life teaches us a lot of things. But none is a better teacher than friendship (Importance of Friendship). There is one person who knows who I really am and that is my best friend, Danny. Friendship is a special love. Finding a true friend is always hard. So when one is found, it is important to hang on tight. The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it. Growing up, I was the girl that was confident, strong, and had all the answers. No one had fully ever understood me or my actions, I was constantly on the move, keeping myself busy with any task or activity I could get my hands on, and I never told anyone the entire truth to why that was. My appearance to always seeming assured, formidable and dependable could be imputed to one prevailing time period, but was separated into hundreds of different memories of my past, each with their cause and effect. However, it started with one substantial hit, afflicting me in my teenage years.
As I reach the seemingly boring age of 19, I am able to look back and reflect on how my choices in the past have gotten me to where I am today. One of the most significant decisions I have made in my life was to minimize my friend group. Now, losing friends is something you hear about before you even hit junior high. The common phrase is repeated over and over again, when referring to high school, “You find out who your real friends are.” As a scrawny little freshman, with no sense of reality, I refused to believe that that phrase would ever apply to my life. The end of my sophomore year is when my then, sixteen-year-old self, realized that that overused phrase was more relevant to my life than I wanted it to be. So I did something about it.