Maintaining Your Friendship – Why is it important to have a support system?

Good friendship is the root of a lasting relationship that provides a deeper closeness between two people. It deepens the strong intimacy of both friends and for that strong relationship to last longer, there must be some other interventions, say a support mechanism that leads to a stronger friendship.

It would be useless to be too close friends, when after a while it would just break up and end in frustration for both parties. A good support system, therefore, is vital and must be applied.

6 ways to keep your friendship

1. Close companionship. When I was in high school, I met a good classmate in my first year. He was a nice guy and we became very close from the first time we met until we graduated. After we graduated, we parted ways, he went to the city to look for work, and I continued my studies at the university. During our high school days, we always worked together on our homework, school projects, ate together, slept together. etc. Some of our classmates even called us twins because we are inseparable. That’s how close our friendship was.

2. Share. We always share what we have, food, school supplies and everything we use at school. The loss of one is the loss of the other. It is our great advantage over the rest of our peers because, we always give priority to our needs, we strive to make paths that allow us to always be ahead of our peers to present our school’s project. It is in our sharing of works that made us closer.

3. Support and concern. Whenever there is an activity at our school that needs physical participation on our part, we always come together to support one another to share the burden of carrying the heavy load we are lifting. The work becomes easy for us because by working together, we could easily finish the task given to us with ease.

4. Compliments. This is practically a support system that we use to practice as a good friend. When we keep compliments on the way we dress, comb our hair, speak with good manners to older people and colleagues. Each of us give advice to each other. When one gets out of line, the other immediately finds ways to correct the error. Anything that caused our actions to be inconsistent with the desired customs of the group, we would meticulously correct on the spot.

5. Social interaction. As good friends, we would give each other some tips on how to mingle with people at social gatherings. Sometimes during dances we would observe good manners such as approaching the woman to dance with us and thanking her after the dance. In any occasion involving many people, proper etiquette always plays high on our agenda so as not to be uncomfortable with others’ standards. We learn from what we see and tell each other which to follow and which to ignore.

6. Privacy. Because of our closeness to each other, we have a warm relationship and our trust shines through into a stronger friendship. When her mother was in the hospital, we both shared helping her siblings, taking care of her and comforting her in her problems. I showed her my concerns as a way of giving her all my support to alleviate her loneliness caused by her mother’s illness.

These support systems I mentioned provide my close friend with a strong relationship that didn’t end our friendship until he died in an accident 30 years ago. He was hit by a stray bullet directly into his heart and died instantly.