Friendship is as Powerful and Important in Life as Romantic Love.
By: Brooke Meredith
Tags: Life Lessons, Love, Friends, Self, Friendship

image by Sharon McCutcheon from Unsplash.com

Our culture is wrong about romantic love being the pinnacle of all types of love.

We tout romance as the be-all, end-all of loves. The utmost kind of love, as well as, the only one crucial to our lives and wellbeing. Friendship is made out to be a passable, potential side option, though not a necessity. That no other relationship type in life could possibly be as emotionally deep, life-changing, or meaningful as romantic love.

All of this is wildly, wondrously, completely inaccurate and flat out false.

Here are some of the ways in which friendship adds necessary and life-changing riches to our lives.

Friend-fluence. Friends influence us, and to significant degrees. In fact, their influence over us is nearly as strong, if not equal to that exerted over us by our romantic partner. Ever heard the quote, you become like the five people with whom you spend the most time? It’s laden with truth. We will be heavily influenced by the ways our close friends think, speak, live, and act, the people with whom we surround ourselves the most.

Friends influence our health choices, our romantic decisions, the books we might read or televisions shows we may check out. They impact the opinions we might adapt or the things we may spend our free time engaged in. They can sway us, quietly or overtly, toward believing certain things about ourselves and the world around us, into adapting particular opinions or values on all manner of topics. Friends have a significant, resounding impact over our psyches and thus, our choices and behavior.

Emotional currency. Having just one emotionally close, open, high quality, confidant type of friendship adds innumerable riches to our emotional life. This can add a significant sense to our hearts of feeling heard and understood, of a sense of support, kinship, and comfort. To know there is someone out there to whom you can tell everything and anything, and still, they think highly of and even love you, and that this is a person with whom you love spending time and who feels the same toward you, this is a profound life and heart-changing thing. This need not be a romance to create such reverberations in our soul. We can find this equally, and sometimes even more so, with great friends.

Soulmates are not just romantic. Yes, you can absolutely find and experience that soul-mate type of connection with close friends too. What is a soul mate? It’s someone with whom you feel a resounding click. In whose company you feel understood, focused on, and heard. With whom you feel safe and seen. It’s a person on who you can rely and trust. And, someone with whom you have a grand time most, if not all of the time when in their company. A soul mate is also a source of inspiration to you, whether over the things they do in life or certain insights and knowledge they may possess which are thought-provoking and add value to your life. Soul-mates can be both romances and friendships.

Health. Friends impact your health in significant ways. Both your physical and mental health. The people who bring you joy to spend time with? Your emotional health is going to be far better for being in their company. The ones who generally embody a healthy lifestyle themselves? This is likely to rub off on you via their influence. Friends who abuse substances, exhibit disordered eating, or are mentally unhealthy themselves? This is also likely to seep off onto you. Good friends make us healthier, mentally and physically.

Inspiration. Friends can change our thoughts, ways of living, even the course of our lives via their subtle, silent, or even overt influence. Maybe a great friend is the one who gives you that final vote of confidence needed to push you for applying to a particular program of which you dream of being a part of. They could be a more daring version of the self you hope to eventually be and thus, inspire you toward being braver yourself. A friend might be particularly open-hearted, or emotionally strong and mature, this aspect of them influencing and inspiring you to grow more towards similar ways of thinking and being. They might live a life of agency and motivated action, this urging you more in doing the same merely by association.

Alternate perspectives and ways of thinking. We need a few great friends in our life, for another purpose that they gift us with varying perspectives from our own. You don’t want friends who always agree with you. Not only is this boring, but it also does not incite growth or multi-dimensional thought. We learn by exposure to things that are novel or which open new doors in our minds and hearts we didn’t know were there. We flourish and grow when seeds are planted inside of us, which weren’t there prior. In relying only on our romantic partner as our sole alternate perspective, this is incredibly limiting.

It cuts us off from the garnering of other perspectives, insights, and ways of thinking. Ones which can have just as much merit as our own, though may also provoke different ways of thinking and being within us. This is one of the key ways in which we grow, over the course of our lives. We continue the process of growing and becoming through the lessons and insights offered to us by the people with whom we are close.

Life-changing life hack for everyone: approach each interaction with the high quality, emotionally close, mentally healthy, wonderful friends in your life as one in which you can learn and walk away from with new life lessons and ways of thinking. And yes, every single interaction.

An overall sense of life satisfaction, fullness of heart, comfort, and joy. When we have at least one or two emotionally close and emotionally deep friendships, those we can rely on, feel wonderful around, and can confide in as well as laugh along with, this adds incredible worth, warmth, and richness to our lives. It can make the difference between a life of average satisfaction versus one that is joyous, full of light, and one that feels incredibly awesome.