Stiens- Caps Blog #6

Friendship provides us with individuals to share feelings or experiences with but friendships are also in place for us to learn. Many people are friends with those who are similar to them whether it is in background, beliefs, or personality but in coming to college I have found that while it is important to have those you can relate to, it is also important to be friends with those different from yourself. It helps you to expand your knowledge and open your eyes to different views of life.

            When thinking about a friend to compare myself to the dialectic that was kept coming to mind was the differences-similarities dialectic. To describe myself I would say that I am a female. I am 21 years old. I grew up on a farm in Missouri. I am a junior in college. I am Catholic. My personality is not super outgoing but I am also not shy either. I will speak my mind when necessary.  I am a very focused and determined person who works very hard to achieve my goals. To describe my friend I would say that she is also a female. She is also 21 years old. She grew up near Omaha, Nebraska. She is a senior in college. She does not affiliate herself with a particular church. Her personality is super outgoing. She can go up and talk to anyone. However she is more of a people pleaser than I am. She is also very determined and works hard to achieve her goals. The obvious things we have in common are our gender, age, and determination. We are also similar in that we both believe in God and work hard to achieve our goals. However we have our differences, especially in personality. She is different from me in that she was raised in a completely different environment and we were raised with different work ethics. I am super focused where she is more likely to be relaxed. She is very outgoing where I am a little more reserved. Both of our personalities work together so that we can be friends because each of us has certain traits that can offset the other and we can both learn from each other.

            When first forming our friendship, I am going to be honest, I was a little hesitant. I saw her as having no similarities to myself. She was from a city, I was from the country. She was a social butterfly and I was not. However, the more time I spent around her I found out that we actually had a lot in common. We have the same mindset when it comes to accomplishing goals. We have the same drive and determination to achieve something. I have learned how to be more outgoing by being around her. And she has taught me to not judge a book by its cover because she and I have become best friends even with our differences. The way I look at it is if we were only friends with people who had the same views and personalities as ourselves and didn’t have any differences, conversation would be boring. We would never have great discussions which help us to grow and learn as people.

Below is a clip from the TV series, The Big Bang Theory, which puts a comic spin on how to make friends and suggests that sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone to become friends with new people.