Or: friendship in different cultures.
Friends are very important to me. I need them like a plant needs water and sunlight and I consider myself very lucky to call some wonderful people my friends. Friends are not only the people you share a mutual interest with or you like to do the same activity with.
I know many people who are creative or like to run, that doesn’t mean they are all necessarily my friends. Friendship is based on mutual trust, respect and affection, sometimes unity of interests, too. There are different kinds of friendship though and different kinds of friends. I found this interesting article about 10 types of friendships on waitbutwhy.com.
Friendship is a relationship of people based on mutual affection, characterized by sympathy and trust.
Some friends are very close to you on many levels, others are more an acquaintance you meet for the occasional lunch or meet for a mutual workout. Over the years living here in the US I noticed quite some differences between my American and my German or non-American friends. My friends in Germany are long-time friends I made in school, University or even later in life. I met one of my best friends at an open house in Cologne when I was 29 years old. Here in California I have some really good friends, too, but I think way more people I’d rather call acquaintance than friend. That may be due to the life we live here. In order to find friends at the beginning of our expat life, it’s crucial to meet many new people. You started meeting a couple times and soon both sides knew if this was something that could become a friendship or not. Over the years we met many people and naturally not all of them stayed with us. And for me it is not really important how many friends you have, it’s more important that you have a few really good ones. Did you see this video “Medea’s friendship advice”? I love it and I think it is spot on. “Let them go.” You should watch it!
The biggest difference between my American and my German friends is probably that I feel Americans generally like to know lots of people and call lots of people their friends. “The more the merrier.” (Something I never really heard before and I don’t think it’s always true.) They like to have a big pool of people to choose from. They have people they just play golf with, they have friends in their book club, mom friends, friends at the dog park, friends to shop with and so on. My German and other European friends seem to have a group of close friends and these are the people they spend most of their quality time with. Not the activity or the occasion determines the people you hang out with, but the people find things they can do together. I didn’t do my first and only orienteering event because I always wanted to try orienteering, I basically tried it because I love the people that asked me to try it with them.
You can distinguish a good friend from a fake one. Fake friends are like a shadow. On a sunny day you cannot get rid of them. When it is cloudy you cannot find them, no matter how much effort you make. ∞ Abai Qunanbaiuli
Today I had a two phone calls with dear friends in Germany. They keep listening to all my shit over these years and this distance, still call and they get me. One of them said something that made me cry because it was so true, but I never could see it this way myself. Her words stayed with me all day and I was so grateful for her saying them. I didn’t really know where this post was supposed to go, I just read the daily prompt and was thinking about friends, so I guess my bottomline is: Take good care of the people you love, the true friends, the roots of your tree. They will be always there, even on a cloudy day.
daily post: culture
This post is a part of a series called NaBloPoMo 2016 hosted by BlogHer. NaBloPoMo is short for National Blog Posting Month and it challenges writers and creatives to post on their blogs once a day (at least) for the month of November. You can find all my posts on my blogher page, too. Stay tuned!
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