We met in the city where our friendships began. We came from Colorado, Iowa, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Minnesota to spend 48 hours together.
Back in the day, we forged our friendships through homework, tests, first kisses, prom dresses, broken hearts, early morning bible studies, and late night slumber parties. We went rollerskating & sledding. We had typing classes and cross country meets. We laughed and simply had a lot of fun. It was easy to be together. This was the start of beautiful friendships.
We also shared our thoughts, our tears, and our hearts. We discovered that friendship was richer on the other side of vulnerability.
We also discovered that real friends irritate and hurt one another. We learned to talk directly to someone if they hurt us and to listen to their side of the story, too, which usually meant hearing how I hurt them. It turns out that friendship is even richer and deeper after forgiveness.
We’ve been friends for decades. We began our friendships in elementary school or high school, depending on the person. We saw each other throughout our college years and several years after that until the keeping in touch faded to mostly Christmas cards and in-person visits when we happened to be in each other’s towns, but it’s rarely all of us anymore.
Why do I share this? How does this help someone else? Hopefully it’s this: me and my high school friends learned about rich, deep friendship together. Not only does friendship have fun, vulnerability, and forgiveness; true friendship adds friends.
It’s a building block. It’s not about exclusivity and only having these seven friends for life but expanding our circles because we had learned how to be a friend. Most of us haven’t lived near one another for decades — we have needed other women in our lives.
I walked into this weekend where ‘I know and am known’ and it felt like coming home. It reminded me that it takes time to build these kind of friendships but that it is worth it.
What have you learned about friendship through the years? How do you invest in it?
