How to Be a Good Friend

Acquiring a true friend is extremely important. Friends play a vital role in our lives. They widen one's prospective by introducing new people from different areas (Sternbuch). In addition, friends are there to guide and pick you up when you fall. Since everyone has different personalities, people look for different kinds of friends. However, there are three main qualities one should look for when acquiring a friend. They are loyalty, understanding, and encouraging. A person with these qualities is bound to be a true, close friend. One can work on these traits and thus be that loyal friend everyone wishes to have.

Loyalty is one of the main qualities one looks for when searching for a friend. Every person needs to know that someone is really loyal to them. It's not a good feeling to have a friend that's only friends with you due to a lack of nobody else. People thrive on the loyalty displayed from a friend (Bandman). However, there are those that don't display loyalty to their friend. An example of a lack of loyalty is sharing someone else's secrets. At least once in a person's life, one has encountered a friend that likes to share secrets that belong to others. This is very entertaining for his/her friends, yet the person with the secret loses all trust in him. With no doubt, no one likes having a blabbermouth as a friend. It is most comfortable to tell secrets to someone that is trustworthy. A loyal friend protects their friends' secrets under any conditions. Unless permission is given, friends should not publicize each other's secrets. If friends do reveal others' secrets, it could destroy their friendship. A sample situation could be, one's parents had a divorce and she shared this dilemma with a friend. As a friend, he should have coached her through this painful experience. Instead of doing this, he went and shared the private information with others. The result was an ending to their long lasting friendship.

Understanding other people is essential in being a good friend. There are those people that only understand their perspective. They feel that everything they do is right. They therefore can't understand why anyone would do things differently. They attribute other people's hardships to the fact that the other person is doing things improperly. For example, if their friend tells them that she's having a hard time juggling her housework with caring for her children.