Art of Friendship

CATEGORY: SOCIAL

Why:

Friendships are essential for our happiness. Creating and maintaining them is a matter of skill, and any of us can improve our friendship abilities.

Warm-Up:

Tell us the story of how one of your best friendships got started.

Exploration:

One of the most important ingredients for happiness—sometimes the most important ingredient—is great friendships. They make everything better in life. Friendships aren't random: they take skill. Sometimes the key skill is how to begin one, reaching out to someone even if it's awkward at first. Sometimes the skill is how to repair a friendship after a difficult situation. What are the skills you've learned to help you find or maintain a good friendship? What was a challenging moment you experienced in a friendship? What do you value most in a friend?

Additional Resources

For a deeper exploration of this, after discussing how students have formed friendships, invite stories about how students have repaired friendships. Have you ever had something go wrong in a friendship, or things become awkward? Were you able to repair it? If not, what do you wish you could have done? Through this conversation we can also normalize conflict, helping students realize that an awkward moment or disagreement does not necessarily mean the friendship is over. In fact, nearly any friendship lasting long enough will have less positive moments sooner or later.

You may want to close on the note that both creating and fixing friendships is a matter of practice and skill. It's not luck! Through practice you can get better at creating really good friendships, and then fixing the inevitable challenges that come along the way.