Ask questions to get a sense of the problem or issue, but the main thing is to listen to them. Once you get the thumbs up, hug away! Hugging your friends can be a great way to show you care for them. Physical contact can be comforting, especially when someone feels alone.
So, go for it! It's not always easy to find the right place to start. Having good friends makes you happy, and being a good friend to others makes them happy, too. Think about your friendships - are you being a good friend? Are your friends being a good friend to you? Good friends say and do things that make you feel good, giving compliments and congratulations and being happy for you.
If you need help, a good friend will try to help you out. Everyone is different, and has different hobbies and interests. A good friend understands that sometimes you do your own thing, and enjoys doing the things you have in common together. LD: Just like a strong relationship is good for you, a negative relationship is bad for you. Even an ambivalent relationship is bad for you, it turns out, biologically.
An ambivalent relationship is a relationship where you have positive feelings and negative feelings about the person or about your interactions with them. Researchers had a scale of one to five: How positive does this relationship make you feel, and how negative does this relationship make you feel?
Anybody who was two or above on both things counted as ambivalent, which is really broad. You could be five on the good and two on the bad. What was interesting was that any relationship that was categorized as ambivalent seemed to generate cardiovascular issues and other kinds of health problems.
But I think that the problem with ambivalent relationships, which a lot of us have many of, is more surprising. I think that all this is a reminder of the importance of working on relationships—all of them, but including your friendships. One is you can try to make it better, work on it, have a hard conversation, perhaps.
And three would be that you shuffle that friend to the outer circles of your social life. KN: Are there some practices you would suggest or steps that you take in your own life to put more time and energy into friendship?
LD: It really does just begin as simply as paying attention and prioritizing. Whether people hold onto their old friends or grow apart seems to come down to dedication and communication. Hanging out with a set of lifelong best friends can be annoying, because the years of inside jokes and references often make their communication unintelligible to outsiders.
But this sort of shared language is part of what makes friendships last. The game was similar to Taboo, in that one partner gave clues about a word without actually saying it, while the other guessed. Of course, people can communicate with friends in more ways than ever, and media multiplexity theory suggests that the more platforms through which friends communicate—texting and emailing, sending each other funny Snapchats and links on Facebook, and seeing each other in person—the stronger their friendship is.
There are four main levels of maintaining a relationship, and digital communication works better for some than for others. The first is just keeping a relationship alive at all, just to keep it in existence.
They keep it breathing, but mechanically. Next is keeping a relationship at a stable level of closeness. Social media makes it possible to maintain more friendships, but more shallowly. And it can also keep relationships on life support that would and maybe should otherwise have died out. Tommy would be a memory to me. Like, I seriously have not seen Tommy in 35 years. Yay for him! But in the current era of mediated relationships, those relationships never have to time out.
0コメント