At the moments you're leveling up [...] take a look at who is surrounding you. You cannot be surrounded by people you've known for only two years. It was an exhortation to bring your people along for the ride. The people who know where you come from. The people who know what values you hold. The people who give you the gut checks you need. These are the people who will help you make the best decisions with the power and resources you have.

It can be extremely hard to figure out the right amount of growth and sacrifice to be devoting to a friendship, because we're not taught that friends are worth stretching for at all. Your spouse? Definitely ... Your family? There's a therapist for that too. Friends though? When things get hard, it's socially acceptable to abandon them with no conversation about it whatsoever, even if you've been intimate parts of each other's lives for years.

On that spa getaway, we went through the motions and tried to open up to each other. But what really stands out is the uneasy silence, awkward pizza dinner, and stellar body treatments. If you're going to take a sad save-the-relationship vacay, we highly recommend a hot-spring spa. You can't exfoliate the defensive layers around your cold, cold heart, but your outer epidermis will be so soft.

When you are obsessed with your friend's brain, it's natural to crave ordered conversations and excuses to go deeper.

A Big Friendship can hold you when you’re worried that everything else is falling apart. It can be a space of validation when you feel alone in the world. It can provide the relief of feeling seen without having to explain yourself in too many words. And it offers the security of knowing that you won’t have to go through life’s inevitable challenges alone.

We can see now that "low-drama" was a cover for our tendency to avoid conflict, a way we both tried to minimize problems that actually needed to be addressed.

When someone's asking too much of us, maybe we make the sacrifice because that's what our friend needs', says Jordan Pickell ... But [...] it's important to pay attention to feelings of anger, resentment, or frustration, which can be a signal that you're being stretched beyond your capacity. 'A healthy friendship', Pickell continues, is one 'where people. are bringing their true feelings and needs into the relationship'.

No one human can meet your every single emotional need.

We grow in response to each other, in ways both intentional and subconscious.