No matter how adept someone is at maintaining friendships, there will always be conflict. Despite these struggles, friendship and social interaction is a necessary part of human life, so understanding them better is a vitally important topic. Here are some research based approaches of making sure those around you accurately receive how you feel about them (with sources at the bottom).

1. Adding Value

Poor friends take more value than they give to another, while good friends add more value than they receive. Healthy relationships function best when the value each puts in is relatively equal, and without expectation. What is adding value? Adding value is anything that makes the another feel cared for, loved, and valued by the other. A simple method of someone showing the value of another person in their life is by checking in with how a person really feels or is doing. Beyond the basic nature of “how are you” and other formalities, checking in with how someone is truly doing is an essential form of love in the way of expressing genuine care. If this is common sense, great- applying it further and making a conscious effort to think of more ways to make someone know they’re valued to you is fantastic and still underused in many relationships.

2. Empathy

This articles contents are all interrelated to each other, and empathy is a tool to better understand the people around you. By making an effort to see and understand what another person may be feeling about something is a great way to not only gain motivation for helping them, but also to understand the best way to help them out. The old saying of “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” is the basis of this idea and, aside from the overused cliche, it still rings true in dealing with not only your friends, but with anyone you come in contact with. It is much more difficult to be consumed with negative emotions such as anger and frustration with someone when you have a truly empathetic standpoint on why they might be doing what they’re doing. In addition, developing a strong, empathetic perspective has been shown to increase investment, as well as genuine care in others success.

3. Honesty and Being Authentic

Being honest and authentic is a no-brainer, but to expand on it further, openness and honesty is also relevant apart from just ‘telling the truth’. There are hundreds of interactions where people suppress their genuine feelings on something for fear of being rude, hurting someones feelings, or otherwise. For example, in Canadian culture (God bless our maple-syrup-loving souls), there are many cultural norms around being polite and friendly to one another. This is great and doesn’t need a remedy; the only time this becomes a problem is when someone avoids telling another person what that they need to hear, or pretending everything is terrific when it really isn’t. This can hamper someone else’s growth as well as create resentments from within that result from expressing a form of inauthentic behaviour. In other words, if you have to be someone you’re not, say something you wouldn’t say, or pretend to be happy and fantastic, research shows that it will take a toll on your own mental well-being. Being authentic and letting your true self show is easier and beneficial to yourself, as well as the people around you.

4. Communication

As mentioned earlier, these points are connected and this one stems from above. Knowing how to effectively communicate with someone else as well as knowing the right time to is important in making sure the message is received in the right context and in the right state. On top of this, communicating from a perspective of empathy can help make sure that the other person knows it’s coming from a place of love; strengthening the overall message.

5. Committing to Happiness

There’s a mass movement behind loving yourself and putting yourself first. While this is important, it should not take away from investing in your friendships by committing to someones else’s happiness. When someone commits to another’s happiness and they put it ahead of the friendship, they make a decision to do things that are best for the other person despite if it’s uncomfortable. For example, holding someone accountable can be tough and unpleasant, but is necessary to benefit them in the long run. Loving yourself and loving your friends are not mutually exclusive ideas, meaning they should be done together.

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Photos from Elbsandsteingebirge (top), and Bastei Bridge (above) Germany