To me friendships are well maintenaned by mutual respect and understanding, friends might not communicate daily but then they support each other whenever they can, friendships are also sustainable when there's respect and recognition of boundaries between the parties involved.
Friendship is love, understanding, respect for each other , care, trust and kindness.
Friendship should be a safe place with zero judgement and less criticism, instead of judgement or criticism, we correct in love, because friendship is all about love.
Personally, I'm not good at keeping many friends, but the few I keep, I can go as far as displeasing myself to please a friend, I'm so bad at phone communication, but with the person I call my friend , I can neglect that fact and talk to you all day through the phone, especially when you need the conversation.
It was during my NYSC program that I met few friends from the west, they were all Muslims and we understood to respect our boundaries, At first I was scared we would have conflict in beliefs and ideals due to our religious and tribal differences, but we never did, instead we protected each other, shared items together and even our various religious ideas and beliefs, after my stay with them I realized that all we need is love and understanding to be friends, our different beliefs shouldn't be an issue or hinderance to our friendship.
I totally believed that religious and tribal differences has zero effect on friendship, all that's required is love, mutual respect and understanding.
Regardless of our different ideal and beliefs, we related, communicated and understood our differences without criticism.
The only reason I have ended a friendship due to different ideals and beliefs , was due to the persons opinion about a female child and their roles in the society, he downgraded ladies so much that he believed the female gender should only acquire skills and not go to school.
It all happened when a particular guy from the church wanted to know me, he visited the house often, especially when I'm on holidays, had good relationships with my parents and siblings and had intentions of getting into a relationship, it was more like a talking stage.
I was trying to know him, but then we were always having conflicting ideals about life generally, I wasn't expecting us to think alike due to our age differences, but then it got really bad when he downgraded and said some offensive words about the female child and gender, I noticed that three times during a conversations and that was the end of considering a relationship with him.
He came back several times and I was really dismissive about everything he said, opened up to him about how I felt about downgrading girls, because I have sisters and would also have a daughter in future , when he realized it was due to how he spoke about the female gender , he apologized, he sent his sister's and mother to tell me how good he was, but I never believed and that was the end of everything.
Did that because I have to to protect my future female kids, he seems like the kind of man that won't send his daughters to school, because in his word a lady's education ends in her husband's house or the kitchen, I couldn't believe a man in 21st century will think so poor and funny enough he's educated.
When it comes to differences in opinion, I believe everyone deserves to be heard , even if it's an opinion that you totally disagree with, in most cases you could acquire some new information from their beliefs.
Most times , listening to ideals or beliefs that you disagree with could trigger a negative emotion, it's appropriate to dismiss conversation peacefully and never talk about it again.
We all have ideal and belief that others don't believe in, so it's appropriate we respect other peoples believe, be open to learn few things from what they say and also dismiss respectfully when the ideal or belief triggers anger or other kind of negative emotions.
Friendship should be a safe place and if we can tolerate our differences that's also good, because there's no perfect person.
Friendship is love, trust, understanding and respect.
Pictures are mine.
Thanks for reading ♥️