We started a new series – “Authentic Friendships in a Facebook World”
First let’s break the ice 
If you are on Facebook, how many friends do you have? (For those not on facebook – take a guess at how many friends you think you have)
How many of those friends do you talk or chat with at least once a month?
Now think about this – If you dropped off of Facebook (or for those not on Facebook – you stopped associating/communicating with them) – how many of your friends would find another way to communicate with you and see what is going on?
I would like to discuss the positives and negatives of friendships you’ve had. How we relate to our own personal friends and how open we are to making new friends is influenced by the impact of our previous and current friendships.
We start off looking at the negative impacts and later on this week we will focus on the positive.. ( I like to end the week with a good note )
Mike mentioned that negative friendship can impact us by disappointing, distressing, discouraging and/or destroying us. Have you observed or faced a negative friendship (please keep it general and do not mention names or talk about relationships).
Here are some things to talk about…
1) How did the friendship began?
2) When did you notice that the friendship was turning negative?
3) How did it end?
I have been discouraged more than one by so-called friends – I’ve met folks with similar interest and we begin to grow stronger but then something goes wrong and the friendship that may have taken months to grow ends in a flash.
Sometimes I have no idea why… Sometimes, I think the biggest problem prohibiting friendship from growing stronger is our busy lives. I wonder if I force myself to be busy so I do have to take the time to grow closer…
I think the biggest inhibitor for meaningful friendships is we don’t konw what to do when something goes wrong. When we disagree with a friend or get hurt or hurt a friend. We are not very good at seeking/offering forgiveness. We’re also not very good at having a difference of opinion and still being able to move forward with the friendship. All of us want friends who think, look, talk like us because we subconciously feel that validates who we are. That sense of security gets threatened when we don’t see eye to eye. The truth is there is not one person that we will always see eye to eye with on everything, not even a spouse. So we have to learn how to repair hurts and value the friendship more than our own insecurity that they don’t agree with us.