“A lot of our friendships are built on practicality,” says Suzanne Degges-White, Ph.D., chair and professor in the Department of Counseling, Adult, and Higher Education at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL. Maintaining open, honest communication in the days and weeks after hashing it out will help prevent further misunderstanding or hurt feelings. Trust and loyalty go hand-in-hand for friends. Friends can trust you with their secrets, both large and small, because good friends never break a confidence. Genuine praise can affect your friends’ lives. However, if you let anger and hurt rule your actions, you'll undoubtedly cause harm to your reputation and even the other friendships in your life. Let us not step back because we’re unwilling to have necessary conversations and unwilling to give our friends opportunity for explanations and confession. Sure, you may swap stories of your day and ask each other for advice, but there’s a level of separation. It’s not unusual to have a moment when you realize that you need to take a step back—and in some cases, you need to take a whole leap back. Are we allowing them to be who God has designed them to be? In a healthy relationship, no matter how much you love your other half, no matter how devoted you are, no matter how strong your relationship is, you should still be able to imagine your life without them. Acting Single, How to Deal If Your Partner Is a Procrastinator, How To Survive Being Married To An Extrovert, Dealing With Disappointment If You Don’t Get a Holiday Proposal, Beware of These 9 Toxic Habits Almost Everyone Develops During Wedding Planning, Why You Get Stressed When Your Partner Is Stressed, 5 Signs Your Relationship Is Strong Enough To Get Engaged, Brides uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience and for our. You might have a hard time scheduling get-togethers because neither of you see the relationship as a priority. If we find ourselves consistently circumventing Christ, trying to make others our peace, or believing we’re the rescuing peace for others, we must take a step back, confess and repent of our idolatry, and reorient ourselves under the reign of Christ’s peace. If with the Lord’s help we have obeyed His commands in Colossians 3:12–15 and still discern that something feels “off” about our friendship, it may very well be that the safeguard of Christ’s peace is being circumvented. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Friendship is a gift because, in its best form, it turns our focus toward the God who chose us and has made us holy and beloved. She blogs at Grace Covers Me.