Member-only story
Valuable friends
“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”
- Walter Winchell
Where would we be without our friends? It really depends on what type of friends we have and how they contribute to our overall wellbeing. If you were forced to rank your friends in order of the amount of value they provide to you, where would each of them fall? It may not seem fair to rank our friends by their qualities, since qualities can be subjective, and some carry more weight than others. However, if we had to line five friend up right now, it may not be that difficult.
To clarify, I do not define valuable as having the ability to always pick up the tab or having access to the company suite for concerts and sporting events. Those are some nice perks of a friendship, but they are simply that. Perks. If that friend who always picks up the tab is never able to help out whenever you ask them for a favor, maybe they aren’t being much of a friend at all. Maybe that friend who gets those great concert seats always wants to use that time to complain about how miserable their life is. I’m not saying we should not be there to comfort our friends, but there’s a time and a place. It should also be reciprocal.
When I evaluate my friendships and assign some sort of arbitrary value to them, it helps me to determine who is there for me when I need some…
