Friendship is an investment paid in time, money, love

“Whoever said friendship doesn’t cost a thing was lying,” a friend recently said to me. “Friendship will cost you time and money”. She was right. Perhaps it is the life season I am in, but I have walked some treacherous paths with friends that I never imagined I would when we started building a relationship years ago.

From loss, both my own and theirs, the grief journey, relationship breakdowns, children going astray, financial crisis, illnesses and even periods of depression. Friendship is easy when everything is going well, when we meet to catch up and laugh over a drink. Yet true friendship comes into significance in life’s dark moments, those times when we weigh the cost to us, and hopefully make the choice to come through for a friend. 

However, like all relationships, friendship has to be negotiated, expectations clearly set out and communicated. We expect our friends will show up when we are going through crisis, but sometimes that’s when fair weather friends begin avoiding us, leaving us reeling in the throes of rejection.

“I thought we were friends,” we say woefully. We may have been, but they counted the cost and decided it was too heavy to bear. If we are not careful, we can become bitter and vengeful, recalling all the times we showed up for someone, only to have them let us down when we needed their support. 

CELEBRATING WOMEN FRIENDSHIPS

Fortunately, there is usually a saving grace at such moments, and it comes in the form of unexpected friends, people we didn’t expect who stand by us. Sometimes they go on to become our lifelong friends. Occasionally, they are just Providence’s way of reminding us we are not alone, and then they are off their merry way.

It is tempting to try and hold on when that was just a fleeting relationship that came for a time and a season.

We need to recognise our seasonal friends, bless and release them, then pay the favour forward to someone else in need. When we are the recipients of such unwarranted grace, we learn to forgive those friends who let us down. Life’s trials come to help us sift through our relationships. 

Yet friendship can also be a mutual growth and learning process because no one is a perfect friend. We learn through trial and error what it means to be a real friend and reap the fruits of lifelong friendship when we can stick around through the unpleasantness instead of running off to form new friendships. We fail our friends as they do us, we ask for forgiveness or give it and move forward resolving to grow from the experience.

Over time, we unmask ourselves, revealing our vulnerabilities to our friends and they come to know and accept us as we do them until finally, love happens. This bond can be so deep as to outlive us.

Recently, a close friend got married. Her mother had passed away close to 30 years ago. However, it was heart-warming to see her mother’s friends make the journey across continents to be there for their friends’ daughter. Another group of friends took their deceased friends children through school and into university when she passed away.

Both sets of friends counted the cost, gave their time and money but the cost of their love was surely greater. Why don’t we all build such deep friendships? What is the skill set required for lasting friendship? Kenyan author Margery Kabuya writes  in Celebrating Friendship Among Women, “Friendship should be built on a win-win philosophy. It is not competition, and it is not a winner-take-it all relationship.

In a good friendship, each one of us wins. If a person in a friendship settles a matter in such a manner that one wins and the other loses and she does this often enough, the friendship will break at some point...A healthy friendship aims at equity and has the needs of each met, not of one party.

Unequal relationships be they marriages or friendships, are unhappy.” Like all other important things friendship is an investment paid in time, money and ultimately love.