The May 2^nd service of the NTCOF featured the subject of FRIENDSHIP by NTCOF Presenters Don Lewellyn, Erin Taylor and Licensed Professional Counselor Luciana Whipple.  Mr. Lewellyn considered some stories of friendship and the lessons – and questions! – such stories offer us in thinking about what it means to have friends and how friends help us bring meaning to our lives.  Ms. Whipple reminded us of what friends do for us and what we do for our friends, and also what friendships can’t do.  She discussed levels of friendship in terms of the degrees of trust and intimacy we establish with others, that friends offer benefits that show up in not just our emotional but our physical health.  Scientific evidence strongly suggests that loneliness and friendlessness can adversely affect life and health.  Drug and alcohol addictions can be the cause and/or effect of a failure to establish and maintain healthy friendships.  Most importantly, “friendship brings us joy!”  Whipple discussed how true friendships can survive conflict and difficulties, can overcome the bounds of time and space and even “dissolve the distance between life and death” when we remember and continue to benefit from our past connections with friends who have died.  Ms. Whipple identified 15 elements of successful friendships:

1. TRUST (We need to be able to trust and to be loyal to our friends.)
2. HONESTY (Tactful honesty is a foundation of friendship!)
3. RESPECT (We honor our disagreements as well as our agreements and respect healthy boundaries.)
4. ACCEPTANCE (We want to “be ourselves” with our friends and accept our friends for who they are as well.)
5. SHARED INTERESTS (It makes it easier to have friends when we can do things together.)
6. SHARED VALUES (The most solid friendships depend on similar core values.)
7. COOPERATION (Friendships depend on a certain level of working together to foster and support the friendship and its needs.)
8. RELIABILITY (Friends rely on each other so friends need to be dependable.)
9. SUPPORT (As Mark Twain put it, we want friends that can defend us when we’re in the wrong since nearly everyone will defend us when we’re in the right!)
10. UNDERSTANDING (Most people would rather be understood even more than agreed with.)
11. SENSITIVITY (Friends who know us can often know how we are feeling.)
12. RECIPROCITY (What we expect or do with or for our friends is what is expected of us.)
13. ABILITY TO COMPROMISE (Friends are willing to “give in” at times and let the other person have something their way.)
14. SENSE OF EQUALITY (It is hard to have a real friendship with someone that we are either responsible to or for.  This is why it doesn’t work out well for a parent to try to be “best friends” with their child(ren).)
15. FORGIVENESS (Too much to say about this!  And even with friends forgiving is not the same as forgetting or even setting ourselves up for another cause for forgiveness.)

Finally, Ms. Whipple reminded us that we often need different friends for different situations and at different levels of intimacy, that one friend cannot fulfill all of our needs.  Our challenge, she concluded, is also to explore what it means to restore the public nature of friendship to the world.  There are connections between friendships and choice, justice and the public good that need to receive greater attention and care.

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