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New series of blog posts: Initiative in friendships

Lynne Baab • Tuesday June 20 2017

New series of blog posts: Initiative in friendships

I often think of friendship as a verb, and when I think of actions that shape friendship, what comes to mind first and foremost is the willingness to take initiative. Over and over.

Initiative means making some kind of response after a friend has surgery. Perhaps a card, a meal, a gift, a phone call or a visit. Initiative means creating opportunities to listen when a friend is going through a crisis—suggesting a conversation over coffee, making time for a phone call or sending an email with specific questions about the situation. Initiative means checking in with friends when you haven’t heard from them for a while. Initiative means remembering to pray for a friend’s needs.

I know that initiative is so important to me because I had to navigate eleven moves in my first fifteen years. As I look back on my childhood, I can see clearly that if I hadn’t taken initiative over and over to reach out to potential new friends, I would have been desperately lonely.

The emphasis I place on initiating in friendship also comes from conversations I’ve had with both men and women over the years. “I have trouble initiating,” many people have told me as they talk about feeling isolated and wanting more friends.

Serena, a librarian in her fifties, expressed two important beliefs when I interviewed her: “friendship takes time” and “to be friends requires intentionality; it rarely ‘happens.’” She noted that people so often say, “Let’s get together,” but find it hard to follow through. “I wouldn’t have either,” she said, “had I not scribbled notes to myself on my calendar or scraps of paper in my car to ‘call this person’ or ‘invite that person over for dinner.’”

Serena has nurtured the habit over the years of having people over for tea or dinner, either individually or in groups, and in this way has developed friendships with neighbors, coworkers and church members.

Tabitha, in her eighties, has reflected a lot about initiative in friendships. She takes frequent initiative with friends, but is always grateful when someone else jumps in and makes connection with her. She reflected: “Good friends are caring, loyal and understanding. They’re strong, so you can lean on them. They have integrity, so you know that what you tell them won’t go any further. They have time for you, and they make connection with you at least sometimes, so it’s not always you who has to take initiative.”

Initiative in friendships today takes many forms, and in this series of blog posts I’ll describe a variety of kinds of initiative. I’ll also explore some of the obstacles to initiating. I’ll close with a lovely quotation from Orlando A. Battista (1917–1995):

The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they’re still alive.

(Next week: “What Mary might have missed.” If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up under “subscribe” in the right hand column. Illustration by Dave Baab: "Walking at Greenlake." This post excerpted from my book Friending: Real Relationships in a Virtual World.)



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