Active Friendship Management

 

It is yet another wonderful Friday and once again we get to gather here for a bit of a read up. It is good to read. Apparently, I have been reading a book titled Designing Your Work Life and I have been getting bad and good tips. Do not be surprised if you hear of me resigning from my job.

I digressed.

A lot of you showered me with praises for some things I did not do. While I take credit for fielding a guest writer who told you about his experiences in Las Vegas (where I have not been to as some of you rightly pointed out), I did not write the article about Ndirande. That credit goes to an idiot, whose only detail I can give is that she is a respectable lady who for some reason grew up in and still stays in Ndirande despite changing levels. I am here now, though. This is the Richie of Richie Online. Landilodi wabwera.

I previously expressed my love for the social media in my past posts. I will share a bit of what I posted a couple of months ago when I was telling people that they do not have to be passive about their Facebook connections. In that post, I expressed how I actively manage my friend list on Facebook including what criteria I use when adding and axing Facebook friends. Long story short, it was about previous and current interaction and added to similarities in our lives. Recent experiences, however, have pushed me into thinking deeper into how to mage friends in real life.

In recent times, I have found myself increasingly performing tasks that I have never performed before in my work life. Here is why. Other than being the medical doctor I was trained to be for a good six years at the College of Medicine, I decided to pursue other interests which are a little too far from the bedside. These required me to sort of prove myself in the field and I have found myself on YouTube and other unusual sites trying to consolidate my knowledge in the new field. Because of the limited interactiveness of such platforms, I found myself in need of supplementary knowledge which I could only get from people who I have not interacted with before. Luckily enough, before I embarked on this journey into the unknown, I had engaged some “Facebook friend” who I actually had not met before. All I had to do was to tell him who I am and what I was planning to do. Somehow it has worked out and this human has proven to be a very awesome resource in my work.

In the same recent times, I have found myself been called upon by my friends to do them some favors relating to their work or personal lives. These obviously involve me doing them a favor that may fall in the lines of career, social and financial lives or any other dimension that they may see me suitable to help. In some cases, I have been able to help with whatever request I am presented with but in soms cases I have been able to for two reasons. The first reason is just that the help I was requested to provide was beyond my means but the second reason was that I was simply not willing to do so. If you asked me to give you a soft loan of “ka fifite” and I said no, chances are just that you did something that made sure I was going to say no to your requests of soft loans until you adequately repent and atone for your sins. I probably forgave but atonement is important.

This brings me to the topic of the day: active friendship management. I feel like people stay on the back foot in their friendships to the extent of not paying attention to them. In my previous article about friendships, I talked about how it is important to nurture friendships that provide for us. For the needs of that article, that may have worked out but it is important to pay attention to the needs of our friends too. Rather related to providing for the needs of our friends, active friendship management also calls for us to reciprocate the needs of our friends, to advise our friends and to manage our expectations on what they can do for us.

However strongly you may deny it, it is a known fact that it is human nature to be selfish. To put that in context, most of the friendships we make are made out of personal benefit. We make friendships because we are looking for something out of them. That is not wrong in itself. What is wrong, however is this thing of ignoring the other person’s needs while prioritizing our own. In every friendship, we need to think of what we could possibly offer to our partner and that is healthy. Our friends also feel a bit more welcome to ask us for help when we are open enough and able to offer them something in return for their good friendship. A tale is told of a toddler who asked her mother of why she had gone over to their neighbors to ask for salt when they had salt at home. The mother in turn told her that she did that in order to make the neighbor feel needed. The story was that the neighbor always came by to ask for various necessities and the mother felt that if the trend continued the neighbor would have felt like she was being a burden. This may not apply to all friendships, but the truth of the matter is that good friendships are bilateral; you give in something and you get something out. That is something we all need to keep in mind. While we get something out of our friendships, we also need to give in something periodically, however small.

Then there is the issue of reciprocation. Another important aspect of managing our friendships if giving back the favors our friends give us. This is rather related to the previous point. For those of you who have gone through an adverse event or a wonderful event, you understand how important it is for people to show up at your wedding or your grandmother’s funeral. Depending on how close you are to your friends, you expect a certain cohort of people you hold dear to be present at your events. These expectations get heightened when one has been present at a friend’s hour of need and as such we need to give back the favors others give. Just for our friends’ sake.

The other way of actively managing friendships is the issue of advising our friends. It will be great to acknowledge how much friendship is enjoyed when you hardly restrict each other’s actions among peers. If you guys want to unnecessarily go shopping, you go. If it is an impromptu drinking spree in another city, you go on without giving a second thought to a friend’s suggestion. There comes a certain time when we need to curb our friend’s actions. This sort of advice may go into their spending habits, love life, career and spiritual life where most of us feel a bit uncomfortable to advise our friends, mostly for the fear of losing our friends. All I am saying is, advising our friends when we feel like our word is for their good is our duty even when we feel like we will do it at the expense of our friendship.

Here is the last one; preparation. Most friendships have been lost because people were hit with something they least expected whether good or bad. Ladies. You probably lost a male friend because they asked you out. Now that was not a bad thing. There are times that we have lost friends because they did not show up for us. On the other hand, we need to keep our window of expectations open to avoid being overwhelmed by disappointment or excitement. Great expectations create frustrated men so we need to manage our expectations from our friends.

That being said, having and maintaining friends is not as passive as we like to think it is. It is an exercise that needs out utmost attention and we need to treat it as such. Eetu. Kukhala ndi anzanu musamakuphweketse.