How to Keep Your Friends Close

Once a friendship is built, it often doesn’t keep going just like that. You need to keep it going by keeping your friends close and interacting with them on a continual basis.

A friendship is like a flower. It needs sun, water and various nutritive substances in order to grow and blossom. Many friendships go down the drain simply because the two or more individuals involved in it don’t take the time to interact often enough.

Apparently, a good friendship will keep going on its own. However, in practice, there are many specific problems that may prevent this from happening: preconceptions, distance, lack of time, difficulty in synchronizing agendas, a lack of ideas for enjoyable things to do and so on.

Thus, a friendship with good potential can weaken and dissolve. If you want to prevent this from happening, it’s essential to proactively keep your friends close and make the interactions with them meaningful.

Take the Initiative

One simple idea you can put into practice and see great results is to take the initiative in interacting with your friends. Give them a call or an email and ask them to hang out whenever you want to.

Many times, we wait for the other person to do this. We think that if they are our friend, they should do that; and if they don’t, than they must be really busy or something. Well, often the other person is in the exact same position, thinking the same way. This is how people pointlessly postpone meeting.

The key lesson here is to drop the excuses, drop the hesitation, drop the expectations and take action. If you want to meet a friend and do something together, then contact them immediately.

In order to keep a friendship going and keep that emotional connection, it’s important to meet your friends frequently. Frequency of interaction, more than length, is what helps two or more people bond. Keep this in mind in order to get you more motivated to take the initiative.

Overcome Logistical Obstacles

Here’s something I often see happen: two friends decide to hang out and then they try to set a time and date. But the first person can’t make it Monday and Tuesday, the other one can’t make it Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, and they’re both busy in the weekend.

So they decide to give it a quit and talk again next week. And next week, they encounter a similar logistical problem, so they keep postponing their going out together. Eventually, this kind of a pattern erodes their friendship.

We live in a world with many options and many demands. Most of us are very busy and have plenty of urgent things to do that tends to make us ignore the important things in their favor. However, if a friendship is important to you, don’t let a busy schedule prevent you from seeing your friend.

The key here is to prioritize. Find things you don’t really need to do, things you can delay doing or things you can delegate. Get them out of your agenda and clear some time to meet with your friends. You can find the time, if you make it a priority.

Your relationships with other people are one of the most fulfilling components of your life. This is why you want to keep your friends close, even if this means working to overcome some logistical or mental obstacles. At the end of the day, you’ll be glad you did it.