Friendship is the combination of loyalty, trust, respect, and affection among people. Over the years, I have made various friends, but none compares to Charlie. We have maintained our friendship since 2015, all this time, ensuring we are there for one another in all situations, good or bad. We met at a voluntary community exercise. The event was attended by people of different ages, including children, parents, and grandparents. It also presented an opportunity for people to interact. It was during the teenagers' meeting that I became fond of Charlie. A simple "Hello" led to the development of the relationship that we have today. At first, I saw Charlie as a silent and arrogant person because he did not interact with people. However, after talking with him, I realized how honest and trustworthy he would be as a friend (Guerrero et al., 2018). We exchanged contacts and started seeing each other over weekends and school holidays. I also realized that Charlie loved soccer, which was my favorite sport; consequently, we started attending soccer matches together. Charlie is such a special friend to me because of his honesty and respect for everyone. Even though we have disagreed on various occasions, I have never seen Charlie become disrespectful to anyone, not even me. Connectedly, this paper uses my friendship with Charlie to analyze my attributes, my friend's qualities, and the features of my physical and social environment. The paper also analyzes how the theory of attraction enabled our features to be compatible for establishing our friendship.
The attraction theory is critical in explaining the growth of my friendship with Charlie. According to the attraction theory, people are attracted to others because of specific attributes, including; appearance, rewards, similarity, and proximity (Guerrero et al., 2018). My attraction to Charlie was mainly because of the similarities we shared. Therefore, I can describe my relationship with Charlie originating from both the social and intellectual attraction basis. During the event, everyone was requested to introduce themselves and motivate their peers through stories or motivational quotes. I did not pay much attention to the presentations, but I instantly became more attentive when Charlie started speaking. Charlie was calm and presented himself in an intellectual manner, which made me believe that he was highly knowledgeable. I instantly found a reason to know him better and to learn more from him. In essence, this pushed me to start a conversation with him. I viewed Charlie as more knowledgeable than me, even though we were of a similar age group. When I started talking with him, I realized that I was not wrong; Charlie was spent most of his time reading books. I wanted to be like him, and my desire pushed me to maintain a close relationship with him. In the social aspect, I liked the environment that Charlie and I would make together. As a person who loved learning, I knew Charlie would help me greatly by introducing educative topics and encouraging me to continue studying. Our friendship continued growing stronger as we continued understanding our similarities in life. I learned to cope with Charlie's weaknesses, and similarly, he started to cope with what he did not like about me. Today, I feel like we are inseparable because of the numerous memories and experiences we have shared.
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My personal qualities played a critical role in building the friendship with Charlie. Curiosity is my most outstanding quality, whereby I always have the desire to know more about things, especially educational and health-related issues. For this reason, I am always reading books, articles, news, and magazines. I think this attribute played a crucial role in building my lasting friendship with Charlie. I am also sincere and honest with people and myself. The attribute also played a crucial role in building my friendship with Charlie. In essence, during the teenagers' sub-event in the community event, most teenagers talked about how their parents forced them to come. The teens stated how they could have spent the weekend visiting their friends and playing videogames. My family had just moved to the neighborhood; hence, I had not interacted with any teens yet. By good luck, I met Charlie alone and said hello to him. We started talking, and I expressed my displeasure with how the teenagers behaved in the event. Our friendship would have probably not started if I was dishonest with Charlie. However, because I told the truth, Charlie developed a sense of connection with me, and he became open with me. Later, he told me how he was afraid of expressing such a view because the teens would probably hate him.
I also have reasonable, trusting, and compassionate attributes, which I think contributed to our friendship. As a reasonable person, I always find the logic behind everything before making any conclusions. Through this attribute, I always like reason over feelings. I also show compassion towards people, especially the unfortunate. When I saw Charlie standing alone during the event, I felt the need to talk with him and fight the boredom he experienced. I think it was compassion that pushed me to initiate a conversation with Charlie.
Charlie's attributes have also contributed to the growth of our friendship. First, Charlie is a good listener, and this is the first attribute that I noted since the first time we met. After approaching him on our first day, Charlie was keen, listening to what I had to say and not disrupting me. Charlie proved to be a good listener, years late when he reminded me of the words I had used the first time we met. I was surprised to learn that he remembered everything, from greetings to the words we shared. This attribute made me develop a close relationship with Charlie as I knew he would always listen to my problems and help me solve them. Charlie is also an honest person, always telling the truth without trying to justify himself. He is also the most loyal and trustworthy person I have ever met in my life. As a loyal friend, Charlie always supports my decisions and is always devoted to our friendship's wellbeing. I also like Charlie's non-judgmental attitude, whereby he understands a situation before condemning people (Guerrero et al., 2018). Across our friendship years, Charlie has never judged me for doing contrary to his opinions. Instead, he explains why my choices could be detrimental, thus helping me avoid bad outcomes. This attribute has made me trust Charlie more, and I am always willing to share my secrets with him.
My friend is also supporting an attribute that has helped me grow both in academics and in life. Charlie supports my decisions and motivates me to pursue my dreams and not to give up. However, despite being such a supportive friend, he always tells me when I am about to make bad decisions (Guerrero et al., 2018). After giving me his opinion about my life, he lets me make the final decision and supports me unconditionally. I also like Charlie because he respects everyone, including juniors. Through his communication, one can always tell that Charlie is a respectful friend as he does not let his words or actions hurt other people. In essence, my friendship with Charlie has always relied on effective communication and understanding.
Physical and social environments have also played a key role in our initial attraction and our friendship development. According to the attraction theory, friendships are created by enabling social circles or environments (Guerrero et al., 2018). Our friendship was created by an enabling environment, whereby both Charlie and I were idle and lacked other friends in the neighborhoods. Additionally, we liked the similar environmental conditions to libraries. Hence, physical and social environments contributed to the development of our friendship.
References
Guerrero, L. K. Andersen, P. A. & Afifi, W. A. (2018). Close encounters: Communication in relationships. SAGE Publications.
