I love my friends and have always felt like we had a special kind of relationship with each other. I have had my best friend since I was in pre school and we have maintained that close friendship for 20 years. Another big group of my friends are my girlfriends from high school. I was always so proud of the fact that we all stayed friends even though it’s been several years since high school ended. We’re low maintenance friends. I feel like we have an understanding that we are all in different places, both geographically and in our lives, and that when we need each other we’ll be there, but we don’t have to call each other all the time. When we’re both at home or in the same city, we’ll get together, we try to plan a girl’s weekend once a year, and I know if I ever really needed any of them they would be there. Another group of my friends are the post high school friends. This is probably the smallest group of friends but they are special because they are the most recent genuine friends I’ve made. In many ways I could argue that they almost know me better than some of the friends I’ve had for 10+ years because I’ve spent a lot of one on one time with them in recent years.
Even though I’ve been glad to have low maintenance friends, I sometimes take that for granted. I think I’m a good friend, I’ll definitely be there in a crisis, but as far as being involved in my friends regular day to day lives I don’t make much of an effort. I would hate to wake up one day and realize that we’ve become strangers.
This month is going to be a bit different from the others. My resolutions are not going to follow my daily checklist type tasks. I’m not looking to be obsessively calling or emailing my friends every day.
My resolutions are to try and maintain more regular contact with my friends/cousins/grandparents. For almost all of them I plan on doing this primarily through email. I think my goal will be to send a substantial email every other month. At first I thought monthly but I’m pretty boring and I’m not sure if I could write an interesting enough email every month. For my best friend I am going to make the effort to call her instead of her always calling me. I haven’t had a long distance plan since I lived in my parents house so we have developed this system where she calls me. It’s really not fair and I should make more of an effort in initiating conversations.
I also want to keep better track of important events in my friends lives: a course they are taking for work, a sick relative, a party they were throwing or trip they were taking. I feel like these things will be mentioned to me and then a couple weeks will pass and I’ll forget about them and then won’t follow up with my friend on it. I think I need to write these things down on my calendar and then later I can send them a quick message asking how something went.
I also want to be more open to the possibility of new friends. I have been very closed off to meeting new people for the past year and a half. Friendships require a lot of time and energy and I’m guarded about making these kinds of commitments. I don’t believe that more is more, I am only interested in genuine friends.
So my goals are:
- email friends and family at least every other month
- keep track of, and follow up on important events in friend’s lives
- be more open to new friendships
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