Friendship Matters

In this volume, Dr. Rawlins traces and investigates the varieties, tensions, and functions of friendship for males and females throughout the life course. Using both conceptual and illustrative chapters, the book portrays the degrees of involvement, choice, risk, ambivalence, and ambiguity within friendships, and explores the emotional texture of interactions among friends. A concluding section examines the prospects for friendship in the course of our post-modern blurring of public and private domains and discursive sites.

Without friendship, life would be completely meaningless and it would show the world that you are incapable of building relationships and loving others who are not your family members. The good thing about friendship is that it can be established even at a young age and it has the power to defy age barriers. The old can be friends with the young, and men can be friends with women and vice versa. When in the company of close friends, we tend to open ourselves a lot more and communicate even our darkest secrets, fears and anything we feel like sharing. Friends are like creatures we do not share a drop of blood with, yet they hold the closest spot in our hearts. Richard Obede is the director of public relations and a board member at Love Revolution Canada. He is a former board member at Thrive Community Oshawa. He earned his bachelor's degree in counselling from Canada Christian College. He is a certified counsellor, certified by the Evangelical Order of Pastoral Counsellors of America and the Canadian College of Christian Counsellors. He holds a diploma in sales management and marketing from Tracom College. He is currently pursuing his masters degree in counselling at Canada Christian College.

Transform Your Life Through the Power of Friendship We live in a world where loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions, and millions of women are suffering. The good news? There is a proven antidote. In Friendship Matters, Karen Riddell presents a wealth of data unequivocally showing the power of friendship to dramatically improve the quality of every aspect of your life. While many women find making friends daunting, Friendships Matters is brimming with simple, specific steps and practical tools that will guide you to find, build, and maintain genuine friendships. Friendship Matters offers: —Five Steps to Preparing Mentally —Fifteen Surefire Places to Find Friends —Eight Techniques to Make the Most of Relationships —A Workbook to Create Your Personalized Plan Using her life lessons and interviews with thousands of women who shared their authentic experiences, Karen Riddell demonstrates just how easy it can be to positively transform your life.

Friendships offer us room for personal growth, emotional support, and plenty of fun. Explore the meaning of friendship in a personal case study of two women who've been friends for years and have worked at having an enriching relationship that helps them through the many challenges of life. Authors Wendy Satin Rapaport and Sanda Neshin Bernstein are both clinical psychologists. In Friendship Matters, they use the example of their own friendship to explore the power of this connection. Friendship takes work, but it should be celebrated for the ways it can improve our lives and help us grow. Close friends are lifelines-the people who help us through the worst days and who cheer us on during the best. We can learn to nurture our friendships most effectively by keeping a few principles in mind. For example, though similarities are naturally comforting, it is also important to respect and celebrate differences because these are rich opportunities to learn. Anchored by a dialogue between these two close friends, this wisdom-filled guide shows us how to have more meaningful relationships. With good friends by our side, anything is possible.

How you can make the best of your friendships. In a world where making friends--and unfriending--can be done with a click, is friendship the most disposable relationship? Or is it an underappreciated treasure? How should you think about your friends? In Why Does Friendship Matter?, Chris L. Firestone and Alex H. Pierce consider the profits and perils of friendship. Everyone needs friends. Friends help us navigate and enjoy life: The sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel (Prov 27:9). Firestone and Pierce define friendship, draw from perspectives of the past, and consider different types of friendship, its limits, and possible red flags. Learn what makes for a good friend and how you can be one. The Questions for Restless Minds series applies God's word to today's issues. Each short book faces tough questions honestly and clearly, so you can think wisely, act with conviction, and become more like Christ.

Girls’ bullying is more subtle and less physical than that perpetrated by boys; however, it can be just as powerful, and the emotional repercussions of bullying among girls can be more destructive and longer lasting than the effects of more obvious forms of bullying. Teachers report that quarrels between girls are far more time-consuming and difficult to resolve than the disputes of boys, yet not enough information is available to guide them on dealing with girls’ fighting and unhappiness caused by their relationships with other girls, many of whom may have been their closest friends. Understanding Girls’ Friendships, Fights and Feudsilluminates the issue of girls’ bullying – an issue that can cause a great deal of distress but which is sometimes ignored or dismissed by adults. Drawing on close observations of girls’ behaviour, Val Besag provides an in-depth understanding of girls’ bullying, exploring the mechanisms and language that girls use to entice some into their groups and exclude others. The book offers detailed practical advice for dealing with girls’ bullying, which will help both students and teachers to understand and combat different kinds of bullying, as well as comprehensive guidance for preventing or reducing bullying activities among girls, including: Whole school approaches Programmes for developing emotional literacy and resilience Approaches for dealing with gangs Using methods such as art and drama Developing conflict resolution skills Student – parent programmes Peer support programmes This is key reading for teachers, trainee teachers, educational psychologists and social workers, academics and researchers in the field, and others who have an interest in creating bully-free schools and societies.

For so many of us, our friends are like family members--we lean on them through our highest highs and our lowest lows--but sometimes those friendships don't turn out quite as we hoped. Bible teacher Kelly Needham debunks our world's constricted, narrow view of friendship and casts a richer, more life-giving, biblical vision for friendship. In Friend-ish, Kelly Needham reminds us that we were called to more than halfhearted friendships and lukewarm connections. We need something more stable, secure, and sacred. We were designed for real friendship--but the difficult truth is that too many of us are settling for less. Kelly deconstructs what Scripture says about the gift of friendship and takes a closer look at the distorted view that most of us have instead. As she shares the lessons she's learned from experience, Kelly paints her own glorious vision of what Christian friendship could look like. With hard-fought wisdom, a clear view of Scripture, and a been-there perspective, Friend-ish teaches us how to: Recognize symptoms of idolatry and toxic dependency Boldly ask for what we need from our community of friends Understand and address the problems that arise in friendship--from neediness to discord Recognize when it's time to end an unhealthy friendship Reorient toward the purposeful, loving relationships we all crave that ultimately bring us closer to God Find the friends you need and start to become that friend for others Join Kelly as she challenges you to view your chosen family in a new light, gain a vision of friendship according to Jesus, and finally enjoy friendships as God intended.

In the history of Western thought, friendship's relationship to politics is checkered. Friendship was seen as key to understanding political life in the ancient world, but it was then ignored for centuries. Today, friendship has again become a desirable framework for political interaction. In Friendship Reconsidered, P. E. Digeser contends that our rich and varied practices of friendship multiply and moderate connections to politics. Along the way, she sets forth a series of ideals that appreciates friendship's many forms and its dynamic relationship to individuality, citizenship, political and legal institutions, and international relations. Digeser argues that, as a set of practices bearing a family resemblance to one another, friendship calls our attention to the importance of norms of friendly action and the mutual recognition of motive. Focusing on these attributes clarifies the place of self-interest and duty in friendship and points to its compatibility with the pursuit of individuality. She shows how friendship can provide islands of stability in a sea of citizen-strangers and, in a delegitimized political environment, a bridge between differences. She also explores how political and legal institutions can both undermine and promote friendship. Digeser then looks to the positive potential of international friendships, in which states mutually strive to protect the just character of one another's institutions and policies. Friendship's repertoire of motives and manifestations complicates its relationship to politics, Digeser concludes, but it can help us realize the limits and possibilities for generating new opportunities for cooperation.