Friendships are pretty simple, actually.

If you like someone, if you have some things in common, if you click in significant ways, that can be a friendship.

But there’s one other necessary ingredient.

You have to take one another as. you are.

Yeah, that can be big. But it really doesn’t have to be. Because we don’t have to be invested in how a friend is. We just have to hold space for them to be the person they are.

Now, this can become more challenging if you have some history behind you. Especially history that goes back years, to when. you both were barely formed. Some of those old stories can have a stranglehold on the possibility of a real friendship.

But as adults who have matured and grown, you can write a new story.

That is, if you want to.

I can think of a few friends in my life who were unable to write a new story with me. Maybe it was because they couldn’t get out of their own way. You know, their own resentments. Or maybe their own fears. Or maybe they just didn’t want to. Maybe there wasn’t enough there for them.

One such friend recently died. I loved her then, I love her still and I grieved her loss. But I also grieved the loss of what could have been over all the decades since we last hung out.

Something to think about, isn’t it?