Interestingly, friendship type test has nothing to do with any exam paper, scientific calculation, or machinery job. One doesn't need to give extra effort to know whether his/her friendship is just flattery, misunderstood, and purposeful, or the loyal one.
For knowing your friendship type with a friend, you just need to be a sharp observer of one's behavior, traits, attributes, and life condition. Instead of being just a participant in a relationship, involve yourself with your complete observance too. Let's know below why and how to know your friendship type with your friend!
...I know this all appears a mad or silly talk; but do you know such a mockery happens in our day-to-day life too?
It happens when-
- A friend who was meant to be in life to add the sweetness of honey, backstabs for some piddling self-motives, leaving us with the bitterness of the lifetime.
- A friend makes us feel the warmth of his or her support and togetherness but keeps a cold war of jealousy and envy of our better life inside their heart.
- They show off as if they are a beautiful envelope for you who keeps the very pure-hearted thoughts for you inside their letter; but in reality, they get nothing inside that blank letter. They just flatter to get their purposes solved.
And some friends go one step ahead.
In the case of friendship, the biggest tragedy is-
- we can’t know the honey is sweet or not without tasting it;
- we can’t sense that winter because it comes in front of us wrapped in the warmth.
- We can’t judge that the letter has words or a good message or not until we open that envelop ourselves.
A Shocking Inside Truth: Real or Fake Friendship?
Ever pondered on the difference between ‘just friend’ and ‘real friend’? Just like every crush or affection is not true love, everyone whom we address as a friend is not a real friend.
In such a scenario, how to know a friend is really a friend or not! Let’s try to read between the lines and save ourselves from any kind of bitterness, winter blues, or emptiness. Let’s not allow anyone to make a mockery of us. Let’s use some acumen before the arrival of an unsaid, unscripted, and unwanted prank.
But how?! Let's find out what the Holy Book says! What advice Jesus Christ gave to his disciples regarding dealing with people?!
Now, what the great prophet would have intended to? Let's try to understand by probing the behavioral patterns of the sheep, wolf, serpent, and doves.!
Though the saying was for addressing the strangers whom the disciples of Jesus were going to preach. So is it okay to apply this to the friends? After all, there is some difference between strangers and friends. Well, yes it is worthy to follow in this era of end times; especially when you are going to make a new friend. And not to forget...a verse written in a Holy Book is worth applying in every aspect. It is fresh, useful, and contains new meanings in every situation.
People like Sheep and Wolves
Think, what a wolf would do to a sheep? Simply, it will eat that up as it gets a chance. Here, probably 'sheep' suggests for the meek and innocent person, and 'wolves' suggests for the opportunists of hunting. So what to do if you are meek like that sheep, and want to save yourself from being eaten by the hunters-like oppressing people? Be wise as serpents. But how? Let's know what makes it wise!
Serpent's Behavioral patterns
Serpents do not just bite at the very moment. As snakes use their tongue for smelling because of their limited hearing and seeing ability, they first flick their tongue slowly in a controlled manner, which means they are observing their surroundings. Then they flick their tongue rapidly to indicate that something like a mouse or food has grabbed their attention. And also, that they may bite.
Thus it clears how wisely, indeed cleverly, a serpent observes its surrounding and then proceed to its action. So the simple rule which a serpent teaches is "Observe and act". But what next Jesus told...
Be Harmless like a Dove
It is not hidden from any human that how harmful a serpent can be if it bites. But Jesus completes the sentence by saying to "not be harmful". After all the basic principle of humanity says to spread love and brotherhood.
The Message: A Golden Rule While Dealing with People
Clearly, it suggests that when you are meek or often come up as an innocent dupe, beware of being a target of wolves. For this, observe them and their behavior, and then act. Be a watcher and observer first, and then perform or react. And indeed after this, make someone close to you like a friend.
A Note to Remember
Simultaneously, while understanding the attributes and traits of a genuine friend, don’t forget to ask yourself too, whether it is or it is not so that you are also one of those fake friends lest let’s start with knowing the real meaning of friendship!
Our ultimate goal is not to judge people or behave cunningly. We aim to deal well with people and behave safely. Understanding human behavior is not for just performing smartly, it is also for grooming or improving ourselves.
What is Friendship?
All the time?! Yes, all the time, no matter what! (smiles). There are no two people who are exactly the same in nature, behavior, and other aspects. No two people can have the exact, same "image". We all are different with different views and perceptions. Clashes and arguments are obvious. Differences are obvious. But if we say someone our friend, we should love the friend the way we love ourselves unconditionally in all the circumstances; with and without positive and negative aspects.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
How great! Does such a person exist in this world who can give his life for a friend? Surely such is tough to find. One can trust only on a prophet with much grace of God to love someone this way, beyond the care for his own life.
Where such an ideal scenario is tough to find, let's try to be someone who can make someone's search complete. Let's follow the scripture and learn to love one another. And why not! If someone is "really" a "friend", let the love be the compost. But what about the one who is not a friend, or he doesn't look like a friend? Let's have a brainstorming session about this relationship, becoming realistic; and try to know how, why, and in what circumstances a friendship blossom.
Friendship is a beautiful sentiment that can be seen blossoming at its peak when life is rescued or enriched by the existence of a friend. And when it resonates in your deepest impulses, it gives you sheer joy and pleasure, making your life beautiful.
A real friend and his friendship is that exceptional rose plant that doesn’t grow thorns ever. It appears beautiful when planted around; when you hold it, it smells sweeter and its touch gives a softer and pleasant feel. Even after leaving, its fragrance remains in your hands giving you a beautiful experience.
No belongingness to any kind of bad or hard feelings! How blissful is this, truly a gift on this earth!
Friendship has no survival value, but it does add value to your survival.
Friendship Formation Journey
- Station-1: A formal talk with an unknown person
- Station-2: An unsaid conversion of an unknown person into the acquaintance
- Station-3: Acquaintance turned into just friend
- Station-4: Just friend to friend and friend to best friend.
This whole conversion journey of ‘unknown person to acquaintance to just friend to friend to best friend’ starts from the same point. We encounter and communicate with someone and the human-interaction process begins.
We meet someone on any occasion and see ‘potential’ loyalty or scope of solving a purpose or probability of usefulness and make him or her friend. We start to walk on a journey in which we experience various climate-facets of the friendship weather. Sometimes it is spring holding flowers, other times it is summer; sometimes it is winter too, and other times it is that pleasant drizzle. Just like the weather is never the same, friendship also keeps changing its colors.
Loyalty is never eternal, so the loyal friends.
3 Rules of Loyalty in Friendship
- Do not consider someone as loyal to you without pondering enough. And once you accept someone’s friendship, welcome this relation open-heartedly without any doubts. Put your heart and soul into making this friendship blossom if you want the same loyalty from your friend too.
- Loyalty is an investment (of feelings, support, care, and love). If you are giving your installments on time, you will get your interest too; and sometimes your reward points too.
- Speak loud, bold, clear, honest, and true to your friend; the same way you speak to yourself.
Do not make someone a friend before judging well. Do not judge someone after making him a friend.
Friendship Types and Guidelines
Flattery and Friendship: The Geometry of This Relationship
Flattery pleasures when served with positive reinforcement and wisdom. It soothes the ears and the impulses. When a person flatters us, we do not find space for understanding the difference between flattery and real friendship.
Wisdom harms the relations if used for fulfilling a selfish purpose. Its beam is a sharp sword.
Let's know what happens in a real scene!
Flattery Brings Pleasure
When someone praises or appreciates us, our senses let all good feelings pass inside and they float in patterns giving pleasures.
Pleasure Turns to be an Addiction
They settle deeper in the heart and secure space until you don’t get hurt or are betrayed. Once you give a portion of your heart, that chamber gets decorated with the flowers of spring which fragrance spread as smiles in your life. But you never know when that weather will change. Who has control over it?!
When the False Comes in Light
When it is revealed that all those praises and admiration were just the flattery and for using you for fulfilling a purpose, then that pleasant friendship weather makes you face the storms later. That change boosts the reorientation of the dynamics of your life. How much you get affected, depends on the degree of reorientation or disorientation.
The very reason behind forming a friendship makes a great difference in how the relationship will shape and last.
What to Do?
So whenever you let someone come into your friends’ list, don’t forget to overlook the situations and conditions in which your friendship grows. Ask once yourself about the purpose of your friendship. Is that purpose noble? Is that valid? Or is that fake, materialistic, selfish, and conditional?
Friendship Type Test: How to Identify It is Flattery of Loyal Friendship?
Mostly we judge at first glance that a friendship formation is taking place on genuine grounds or not. But sometimes we make friends and even after walking with them on the same road, we fail to identify it is flattery of friendship. Sometimes the behaviors of your friends change too, after your success or achievements.
A Mighty Note
Always remember, friends may pamper, boost up, or perk us up, but they don’t let flattery be a part of their relationship. Regardless of our designation, income, or fame, they always behave the same way.
In fact, they indirectly and unknowingly keep us sticking to our root version. They make us keep our base-version alive in us. They know us from the time when we had been struggling and they indeed play a part in our journey so they know where we come from and what we are in real. They remind us 'ourselves' when our head gets oversized and makes us meet our base-version again.
And the best part of their story is, they do this all so smoothly and with so much ease that we don’t feel awkward about it; they know the trick to deal with us and the way to make us realize the reality, be it whatever bitter. They always suggest and help us to be a better person, a better version of ourselves.
Loyalty and Misunderstood Friendship
What is Misunderstood Friendship?
If you cannot have faith, trust, and hope in a friend the way you believe in yourself, you both are not real and loyal friends. Or perhaps you did not understand the real meaning of true friendship.
Get Alarmed from the Show-off
Some people become friends, but just to show off their friendship. They never show interest in giving their inputs. Simultaneously they have nothing to do with you and your life. You never can be sure about whether they will stand by you in your adverse situations or not.
Friendship: A Plant to Grow!
Building trust is not a snap’s job; it’s like growing a plant. It takes small efforts. When you give those efforts and after some time that friendship plant grows, you expect fruits and flowers too which is somewhere a reasonable and logical expectation. But what to do when a person has just shaken hands for always getting and doesn’t wish to give even a single effort? Such people always remain ready with their excuses whenever you seek their inputs.
Such a friendship plant is irrigated from one side only and is a misunderstood friendship type that takes you nowhere but to disappointment.
Oops, Those Back-biters!
Such so-called friends can join your anti-group anytime and don’t mind spilling beans against you for enjoyment. When you will commit any mistake, they laugh secretly instead of consoling you.
The 'Bye-Bye' Friends!
In fact, when you get to know the reality and try to flee from the further unrevealed and unproved betrayal, they will not try to regain or flourish your friendship too. They don’t mind if your friendship breaks. Sometimes when they realize that you also have understood that you both were sharing a misunderstood friendship, they try to make distances. They do this deliberately for saving themselves from any kind of embarrassment.
Friendship Type Test: How to Identify if it is a Misunderstood Friendship?
Instead of gossiping about our bad or unfavorable circumstances or behavior, loyal friends straightly reach to us and clear all the clutter. They stand next to us in our bad times. If we do something wrong with them by mistake, they try to correct us and give their mindful efforts for making us a better person. They don’t just forgive, they practice it too. They do it because it is not about winning for them; they value our relationship and so do anything for preserving it.
Purposeful Friendship
We all begin the friendship with some obvious or favorable purposes. They appear genuine in starting, but when such a purpose remains the only reason for friendship, it tends to see hardships in the future. Below are some common purposes that start the weaving of friendship between two people.
Thoughtful Transmission
Your thoughts match, so you want to converse.
Value Addition
You think your friend’s profession, money, help, advice, counseling, or status can add to your kitty (value).
Seek Positivity
Your friend’s positive approach to life and optimistic nature give you the brightness of positivity.
Boost Confidence
Some friends believe in you and your skills so directly or indirectly boost your confidence.
Mood Perk Ups
The comedy and sense of humor of your friend attract you.
Friendship Type Test: How to Identify it is Purposeful of Loyal Friendship?
People who make friends purposefully for reasons, they choose prosperous people for utility, and not for emotions. They try to find usefulness, assistance, or they help only in friendship, which is out of the bondage.
This is why prosperous people are seen surrounded by troops of friends, who don’t take a second in fleeing at the time of crisis, leaving their so-called friends lonely.
The Lime-light-Seekers Caught!
This is the time when a person gets to know the worth of all friends, and also loyalty or faithfulness.
Such estimated and calculated friendships of convenience and favor see fear, betrayal, sorrow, breaks, and pain.
A calculated and estimated relation of searching convenience and favor in an adverse time of need is not real friendship; it is fake and indeed just bargain.
It sees nobility or faithfulness only by the time of usefulness and utility and ultimately witnesses betrayal, fear, heartbreaks, pain, and sorrow.
The Real Friendship of a Loyal Friend
Friendship Type Test: How to Identify a Loyal Friendship?
Dear Friends: The Saviors in Storm
Life gives many surprises with its tricky moves. So do the friends; they surprise us with their mindful and deeper understanding of what we are. They help us in adversities giving us more suitable dealing ways. They manage to do so because they know us and our life very well and in the stressful state when our mind feels stuck, they calmly and patiently remain with us holding our hands tightly.
We all have flaws and we all live low moments which sometimes arouse a self-criticizing negative reflection. In such a phase of life, true friends motivate and push us to be positive and accepting of ourselves. They lift up our spirits with their closeness, cheerful, and supportive presence.
Friends make us feel comfy and confident with ourselves. They make us meet ourselves.
The Fact about Loyal and Real Friendship
A real friend is above any purpose, self, motive, expectation, value addition, or usefulness. There if-and-buts don't work. You know, you rather believe in friends the way you believe in yourself. You trust the way you trust in yourself.
Have you ever thought you can grow negative thoughts or think bad about yourself? You know about your mistakes, minuses, weakness, evens, and still always think positive and good about your life. You never curse yourself whatever bad you do. You never punish yourself for whatever blunders you make.
A true friend is the one you think about whom the same way you think about yourself. No curse, no bad thought, no skeptical attitudes, no complain, no bad opinion. Only love, understanding, hope, loyalty, faith, and truth.
Yes, only a good human can win your heart this way. And only a good human can make such a selfless friend for whom you grow no doubts. But are we talking about ideologies here? Is it not practical or impossible? Don’t such people exist in this world now? Is it a part or aspect of folklore only? “No!”
The foundation of humanity has not collapsed yet. It is there. Good friends exist. True friendship might not be a tree that gives fruits and never steps back from its giving nature, but it can be earned.
The efforts and inputs for relishing the sweetest taste of friendship never go to waste. Either your loyalty from the same friend realizes your genuineness later and then will be back to pay you off for that all ‘good’. If this too doesn’t happen, your goods will be deposited into heaven’s account. All that good which does not pay to you in material or stuff goes in your spiritual balance.
You cannot see the calculations of this account because it is beyond the rules. You add 'X', it will multiply your balance and save 'nX'. How much the goodness can pay, you can’t measure because if you will know the secret of this calculation, you will be astounded and overwhelmed. That ‘n’ is beyond numbers and calculations, so God had not unveiled its mystery. But once you start to sense, you will realize the profit as some treasure that is priceless and incomparable.
Genuine Friendships Rescuing Humanity
For understanding the meaning of a genuine Friendship, a bond between the mother and her baby is the best exemplar. When a mother feeds and grows a little baby, she doesn’t take care of a one-year-old baby thinking of her ‘self’. She doesn’t bestow her love assuming that her baby will serve her in her old age after 40 -50 years.
How obvious is this! No one can plan or forecast the future or life after about 40-50 years.
Then what makes her showering the rain of love, care, and all of her on her little baby?
That bond is unconditional and selfless. That relationship can’t be defined in words or bound in boundaries or set within parameters. It is obvious that the child will pay time and care when they will be needed in the future. But in case that little child fails to fulfill the unsigned and undefined duties due to certain circumstances, conditions, death, or unexpected inabilities, should he be cursed, blamed, or sent to hell?
Let’s see this from a different angle! Should a mother love and care for her baby while thinking of those ‘might be possible’ circumstances?
The fact is- a mother’s love is that fragrance of flower which is given existence to soothe its inhalers. No ‘even or odds’, ‘if or buts’, ‘profit or loss’ works here.
Not only the relation between parents and children but all relations blossom on this same foundation and fundamentals or "Unconditional Love".
The benefits or consequences can’t be judged. Relations are those equations which answer key is not kept in light in our world. It is complicated to solve step-by-step and nail to perfection in solving. Only the formula is disclosed which asks for unconditional and devoted servings. You only can apply the formula and leave the rest to the almighty. Unfortunately, very few of us believe in this formula because we all need the climax with reasonably right results. We all need a happy ending in every story of our life. And we fail here in understanding. Know below how!
Life is not a book of several individual stories; it is fictional, beyond reasons or facts, and is to be seen in integrity.
Life is a series of events with final judgments and climax made in heaven. We see only one part of the film which is directed in this world (planet or earth). This part is witnessed by our body and the other part- by the soul in another world. So it is advised by holy books, scriptures, verses, and elders that we should do right which is as per principles, morals, and ethics. So ideally we should believe in keeping the scrupulous fellowship.
Friendship has an essence that produces partnership and generates mutual understanding. This partnership and understanding find space in all our interests and commons.
We cannot regard ourselves alone to live happily. Have you ever laughed or smiled alone? Love, care, and harmony are made to blossom between people. We cannot enjoy their essence all alone, regarding only ourselves.
The plants of relationship or any bond can’t be irrigated by just their own utilities, choices, and preferences. It grows by feeding with upright and virtuous consciences.
The article is penned considering the meek who aim to live a simple and righteous life, and often become a target because of their loving nature. Such people can't become cunning or revert back in the same language of selfishness, planning, and plotting because of their principles and values.
In such a case, it is good to spread love and follow the path of fellowship with a little observance and caution. It does not at all mean that we need to watch everyone with the eyes of a detective. Just be a little aware of the happenings around to save yourself from prolonging painful situations.
We, humans, are social creatures and made to live together with love, harmony, and understanding. So always tend to be with the crowd, within the circumference of fellowship. Never miss to offer your helpful hand; tend to welcome new friends open-heartedly. In adverse or betraying scenarios, try to understand the situations of others too and find the scopes of patching up. Think from their eyes and perspectives before breaking the relationship. Even if you know that things are not going to work, always keep the doors open for forgiveness and communication. To keep your heart healthy and free, keep it bigger and weightless.
