A few months ago, I was listening to one of my closest friends, lets call her C,  bitch about a girl who she’s been friends with for a long time but has been clashing with lately. After a few minutes she paused and, to my surprise, said “I don’t know why I am mad, this isn’t why I’m friends with her.” Mind Blown.

C is one of the kindest and most heartfelt people I know and so if she is mad at you she generally has a sound reason. She was obviously upset that her friend had made a string of poor decisions in her personal life. C felt obliged to do something about it. That’s why she was talking to me. She wanted advice. But, there was no advice that I could give her that would top the advice she had already given herself.

Rarely do we think about why we are friends with particular people. Mostly we just sum friendships up with “we’ve known each other for ever,” or “we get along,” or “she doesn’t look at me weird when I pick all of the brown M&M’s out of the bowl.” None of those, not even the one about M&M’s, gets to the root of a friendship – the ideological and moral congruities that bring two people into alignment.

What C said on the phone has stuck with me and replays in my head whenever I am frustrated with a friend.

To apply it to your friendships it helps to break it down into three steps:

1. Identify why, exactly, you are angry.
2. Recognize whether the reason you are angry is related to, or divorced from, the reasons you value this person as a friend.
3. If they are unrelated, let it go. If they are related, talk to him/her about why you are angry within the context of why you are friends with specific emphasis on how you value your friendship enough to want to work this out.

90% of the times that I have gone through this process I realized, quite quickly, that I had no right to be angry in the first place.

This isn’t the sexiest piece of advice but it has had a huge impact on my life.

Thanks C 🙂