FRIENDS FIRST

"All relationships, platonic or intimate, share a common road of evolution. Most of us have repeatedly lost our way for want of good directions . Here is the compass that will help you avoid some of the unintended detours, the u-turns, the snarls, and the dead ends that keep us from reaching our desired destination." Robert Emanuel Hall - Newsflash! Relationships, particularly the romantic type, do NOT have to be 'dead-ends' or 'all-or-nothing' propositions that leave you feeling: trapped, unappreciated, unfulfilled, misunderstood, deceived, bitter, or alone? If you are reading this book, it is likely because you desire and deserve to have healthy and happy relationships with others. Question 1. How many times have you been attracted to someone and then pursued a friendship or a more serious relationship only to discover that you really didn't like them? Question 2. Do you find it difficult or uncomfortable: making new friends? retiring (letting go of) bad relationships? trusting family or co-workers? Question 3. Would you like to experience more balance, more depth, more trust, more control, and more personal satisfaction in your social life? I have spent the better part of the last twenty-five years stumbling through platonic and romantic relationships hoping to be a an ear of empathy, desiring to be a strong arm of support, and a assuming that I was a warm heart of tolerance and acceptance; I also expected to find others who would - in their way - understand, validate, and help me feel safe. In all of my emotion and ambition-driven stumbling, I had lost sight of – or, maybe I had never actually recognized - the most important feature of any successful relationship. Friendship! Like most of you, I had rushed head or heart first into early relationships of all types fueled primarily by: common interests, admiration, adoration, the need for validation, physical attraction, social rapport, and a desire for companionship. Excitement and blind confidence (more like naïveté) fast forwarded me right through the early friend building phase - I assumed it was a given – straight into the companionship or partnership phases where I eventually discovered that I had not cultivated enough of a friendship to sustain the so-called relationship. Foolishly, I believed that I had learned a valuable lesson (or two) when failure ultimately came and, of course, expected to do things differently the next time. NOT! "With every good-bye, we must also be willing and able to let go." Robert Emanuel Hall It goes without saying that there are no error-proof relationship strategies; but, 99.9% of us would agree that it is best to begin as FRIENDS FIRST! FRIENDS FIRST is a simple and intuitive approach to better interpersonal relationships and was written in an effort to help minimize or to avoid the pain, the frustration, the disappointment, and the stress that we feel when relationships – particularly, the long-term ones - break down. With marriages and serious commitments failing at a rate of fifty percent or higher, it is painfully clear that the early lessons of childhood and adolescence regarding respectful communication, purposeful conflict resolution, and meaningful forgiveness have been lost, or - sadly for some - were never learned. Successful relationships require the right social skills and tools to manage the inevitabilities of difference, change, and time. FRIENDS FIRST offers those skills and tools that enable you to get to know you so that YOU are then able to get to know ME. “One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.” Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton FRIENDS FIRST will help you take control of and own the responsibility for your role in every type of relationship. You will discover more personal happiness and learn to weave a more rewarding, balanced, and vibrant social web of acquaintances, friends, and family by breaking your relationships down into their three primary conditions: Friendship, Companionship, and Partnership. Within these three conditions, you will also identify and better understand the three levels of engagement: Platonic, Intimate, and Romantic; the three levels of affection: Like, Love and Lust; as well as the critical difference between Wants and Needs. What is meant by an intuitive approach? Intuition - a term used loosely to mean many things - is most often employed as a synonym for the subconscious or instinctive processing of information. Commonly considered your sixth sense, it uses - but does not need to rely on - the information gained through your other five senses. Intuition is a natural gift each of us learns to trust in order to survive. It is what most might refer to as our common sense and has been essential to the management of every relationship since grade school. What makes FRIENDS FIRST different? At the core, and most important to this approach, is your Personal Operating System: the unique list of values, beliefs, experiences, fears, desires, needs, conditioning, and expectations that govern your behaviors. These factors – different in their combination and level of importance for each of us – define your character, shape your persona, drive your ambitions, and manage your ability to establish and build on rapport. Your P. O. S., subsequently, determines: who you think you are; what you would like others to think of you; the social, physical, and spiritual lines you might occasionally straddle; and, those lines that you will never cross. Further, it frames how you perceive, measure, and engage your immediate social environment. “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein The first objective in FRIENDS FIRST is to identify the 'authentic' you. “Who are you? What do you want? What do you need? What do you fear?” Second. FRIENDS FIRST establishes simple and clear definitions of: Friendship - the foundation of all healthy social bonding, Companionship and Partnership. A better understanding of the respective conditions of 'relationship' helps you to manage your actions and your expectations, and, allows you to effectively adjust from one condition to another, and back, if necessary. Will love last longer if you are FRIENDS FIRST? "Definitely," says New York social psychologist Dr. Grace Cornish-Livingstone. "As friends first, you like each other first. You develop a respect for each other. You're looking out for each other's best interests. I urge people--marry your best friend." Dr. Cornish-Livingstone, author of best-selling relationship books like: 'You deserve healthy love, Sis!' says that love, kindness, and respect equal friendship. "You're always kind to your friend. You're looking out for his or her best interest. In a friendship you're equally grounded. You're not looking for any kind of ownership. There's no respect if you become possessive and controlling." "Friendship is especially important for love to last longer when it comes to marriage", says Dr. Cornish-Livingstone. "Marriage takes place long before the wedding. The wedding is the celebration, but the marriage and initial bonding should have started long before. If you have a genuine friendship, you're not going to pretend to be someone you're not so that a person can marry you. Some people are on their best behavior until they cross the threshold. Then, they let their guards down. But your true nature will surface when you're a person's friend first. When you're true friends from the beginning, you don't have to pretend." What is Friending? While used most commonly to describe online social activity, it is employed here to describe all deliberate verbal and non-verbal efforts of communicating with acquaintances and friends.