Friendship

Introduction

Welcome to my friendship website. Hopefully you will find it enjoying, interesting and gain something from this site. To me and many others friendships are very important for many reasons including companionship, support during hard times, sharing your ideas and interests, offering your skills and abilities in return for receiving what someone else has to offer, better team work at work, study or at home, maining good mental health as well as many other reasons.

Making and maintaining friendships can be difficult at times. Although some people make friends very easily, most of us vary in our ability to make and keep our friends. Most of us have gone through times in our lives where we've had lots of friends while during other times it's been hard to find friendships. Sometimes it can appear that everyone we've wanted to make a friend with is too busy, doesn't have time for new friends or just not interested. Social nicieties or lack of direct communication doesn't help. For example the "you must come over some time" which really means "I'm just being polite, I don't really want you to come over" - devasting to someone who is really out there trying to increase their social circle. Other times oneself can be too busy or simply in a position of being in places not conducive to making new friends example working in a highly competitive workplace and not being able to get out at other times to meet new people.

This website will look at various issues to do with friendships including the skills needed, the difficulties involved in making and keeping friends in modern society, getting to know yourself and how you best make friends as well as positive attributes that you can offer to others, as well as issues and difficulties involved in making and keeping friends. Luckily there are also many groups and courses which are very affordable that help people to gain both the skills and confidence to make friends (as well as put people in contact with others also wishing to make friends) so help and input is out there.

A lot of input for this website has come from a course I did in 2001 called "Developing Your Relationships" through WEA Sydney which looked at a whole lot of issues dealing with relationships focusing on friendships.

I have also set up a yahoo group on friendship which I hope that many people will join so that we can all share ideas and discuss issues. It can be accessed at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AllAboutFriendships/

This website is still under construction but I hope to get it finished very quickly. If you have any questions, comments or ideas please email me at sydneydj2001@yahoo.com. I also hope to have a page devoted to viewers questions, answers, comments an stories - I would make sure you were happy with what you want me to post on this site.