Friends and relatives

FRIENDS AND RELATIVES
Friends are biggest value in people’s lives. I have many friends. Most of them are my neighbors, but also I have schoolmates. I can go out somewhere with them and feel comfortable. I know that friends of mine will help me anytime and anywhere. I can trust them. I have one best friend. I may pin his faith. Friendship between a friend of mine and me is firm and intense. He always helps me solve problems and treats me with respect. A friend of mine has never lied to me. It is better to say home truth that sweet lie. If I am upset, my best friend will jolly up me. He is caring, cheerful, trustworthy, outgoing and good-tempered. He is younger than I am. I think that age is not important for a friendship if you can come to an understanding and respect each other. I have friends among people of a different generation. I like younger mates because I can be child . Older people are serious and calm. They care about their studies or jobs. They have less free time. However, I like them because they can teach me something and share their experience. Older friends may help me to do my homework and explain me what I cannot understand. Friends are one of life treasures so that we have to treasure our friendships. It is not easy to make friends nowadays. The true friend should be honest and trustworthy. Without these characteristics, you cannot have a friendship with anyone. Person must be sociable, tolerant, conscientious, and good-tempered if he wants make friends. Furthermore, he must understand other person’s feelings and moods and always help him. If person wants not to lose old friends, he should care about them. He should call them and ask how they are. We should safe our relationships. If we break friendship, it will be hard to recover it.
There are many differences between friends and family, such as whether the relationship will change, what kind of relationships they have and if they live together or not. Each parts show the essential differences between them. First, friendship will change while relationship won’t. If you lose touch with a friend for a long time, there is a possibility that you will become aloof. However, if you don’t keep in touch with your family members, your bond will not change. In addition, when we chat with our family members, we may not care about the feelings of them too much because we know each other so well that we seldom get angry with them. The deep familiarity make we mistake each other less and make jokes more freely. And those jokes and communications …show more content…
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In this essay, the author
Explains that there are many differences between friends and family, such as whether the relationship will change, what kind of relationships they have and if they live together or not.
Explains that friendship will change while relationship won't. if one loses touch with a friend, one's bond will not change.
Explains that family members always live together but friends aren't the same. the closest communication always takes place in home, which is safe and comfortable.
Explains that friendship is a kind of relationship like playmate. families are connected with each other by blood bond.
The closest communication always takes place in home which is a safe and comfortable site. As we all know, home is the warmest place where we are growing up quickly. When we go outside for a long time, we always miss home and family rather than friends. Before going to university, we often meet friends in school in daytime, but seldom live together besides traveling. Living together is a great chance to know each other better, and it is the reason why we may choose to get along with roommates in high school and university. However, no matter how close we are, we may not share every secret with each other, even if we can share all the happy things. But family is our heart harbor. When we are wronged or being misunderstood, we are always willing to pour out to our family members, largely because we live together for such a long time that we trust our family members most. On the other hand, living together from birth enable us to know well about each other’s virtues as well as defects, and accept all of them unconditionally, this is what friends can’t do.
Friends and Family are some of the most important people in someones life because they will always be there for you. There are so many different memories that I have and there is one special item that reminds me of them all. Its a photo in my kitchen and its right by the kitchen table.
The photo is of something very unusual. Its of a bagel garden. In the right top corner of the picture there is a bit of light gray side walk right along a black wrought iron fence. The fence covers the top of the artwork as well. The whole way along the inside of the fence, there square shaped shrubs, which are about half the height of the fence. Beside the row of shrubs on the right side, there is a small path made of the kind of gravel you would put in a fish tank. The gravel has a tiny bit of a purple color. The path turns left at the bottom of the picture and continues along the bottom. On the path there are two rows of bagels on the ground. The bagels are plain. In all there are about twenty-four bagels that are visible in the picture.
In the section that would be the middle of the garden, but what takes up about half of the left side of the picture is more shrubs. These shrubs are made to form the outline of a square flower bed. The inside of the square formed with shrubs is filled with dirt. Planted in the dirt are little pink flower plants. They look like mini circle bushes with little pink flowers at the top. There are twenty-two flowers visible. The pink is a light pink.
It was this photo that, when I looked at it, gave me all the memories of family and friends back. I don’t spend way to much time in my kitchen, but seeing this photo reminded me of a time that I had a lot of fun.
The room smelled like nail polish, spa supplies, and lotion. I was having a spa sleepover birthday party type of thing. We were in my kitchen doing manicures. I had my feet in a foot bath. The bubbles swarming around. My friends were doing a 1 minute manicure scrub in the sink. It smelled like passion fruit. While my feet were soaking, one of my other friends was doing my fingernails. The sound of running water, laughing, along with a mixture of crickets from outside filled the room. Soon I had hands under the running water. I was using the manicure scrub. It was bright orange. It was a mixture of gooey and gritty. As I scrubbed my hands I laughed with my friends and realized how much fun I was having. It was the best birthday party I had ever had.

When I remembered this story, it helped me realize that my friends are some of the most important people in my life. I also realized that I had some of the best friends in the world. They are always there for me. I think that during that night, I laughed more than ever before.

My mom was just finishing up dinner. I was excited. I started jumping up and down, almost bouncing, like a rubber band ball.
“Settle down, its almost done.” my mom said.
I was a little kid, and my mom was making my favorite dish for dinner. I could smell it baking in the oven. It was tuna casserole and it smelled like tuna, but not in a bad way. My mom started to serve it. I could hear the dishes clanking together as she took them over to the kitchen table.
“Yum, tuna casserole.” My dad said as he sat down.
I sat down in my spot next to my dad. As I was eating and savoring the taste in my mouth, I looked around. I realized that the reflection of the fork on the wall was a tiny bit of light. I thought of a fairy.
“Mommy, daddy, look. It looks like a fairy!” I said to my parents in a high-pitched mouse-like voice.
I started playing with the reflection on the wall. That became a normal dinner thing when I was little.
I hadn’t thought about those times at dinner when I was little for a long time. By remembering it, I realized how important family was. I always knew they were important but I never really noticed how much. They mean so much to me. They are the people who will always be on your side no matter what happens. I will never forget that fairy, or any of the other memories of my family because they are so important to me.
Friends and family have their similarities and differences. But they both have one similarity that outweighs all the differences put together. They will always be there for you. Its always nice to feel like you belong and to feel accepted and if there is ever a time when you don’t feel these things, you know theres a place to go. That photo of the bagel garden was only a photo to me in the past, but now I know it has a lot more meaning to it. I never think I will look at the quite same way again.
This goes down without much argument that family is more important than friendship. The family should come first and friends later.
The family and friends will give you the emotional support that you need when you need it. They are always there for you throughout the ups and down of life. Friends may abandon you when things get tough, but family hardly will run away from you when things are not working out.
Take an example of an instance when you have lost a job, or maybe you have poor health. At this time you can’t tend to your needs properly. It’s during such times when you badly need support. Most of the people that you may have thought are your friends and wouldn’t leave you alone always disappoint you by abandoning you, but family members will see you through your struggles till you rise again.
Another reason why the family should always come first is that they mostly know your deepest secrets and were always with you when you were a young child. Most friends would and will use what they know to be your shameful past or secrets to hurt you when there is a misunderstanding. But your family is always concerned about your well-being and will go to any length to make sure that the secrets are guarded at all cost.

As I summarize my argument, it’s evidently clear that while we need friends in our lives, it is paramount to know and acknowledge the crucial role that our family plays throughout our lifetime. The family’s emotional, financial, physical and spiritual support is vital and should not be sidelined. Our family members can be our best friends, but our best friends can’t become our family members. After all, blood is always thicker than water

“My friends are the sisters I was meant to have,” a woman told me. Another said that her friends are more precious than her sisters because they remember things from her past that her sisters don’t and can’t, since they weren’t there. And a man commented that he didn’t enjoy a particular friend’s company all that much, but it was beside the point: “He’s family.”
I interviewed over 80 people for a book I’m writing about friendship, and was struck by how many said that one or another friend is “like family.”
These comments, and how people explained them, shed light on the nature of friendship, the nature of family, and something that lies at the heart of both: what it means to be close.
For friends, as for family, “close” is the holy grail of relationships. (In both contexts I often heard, “I wish we were closer” but never “I wish we weren’t so close.”)
What people meant by “close” could be very different, but their comments all helped me understand how friends could be like family – and why I often say of my friend Karl, “He’s like my brother.” First is longevity. We met at summer camp when I’d just turned 15, and the seeds of closeness were planted during one of those wondrous extended self-revealing teenage conversations, when we sat side by side behind the dining hall. Our friendship continued and deepened as we exchanged long letters that traversed the distance between our homes in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
After college, Karl was the one I called at 2 a.m. when I made a last-minute decision not to join the Peace Corps. Two decades later, we were traveling together when I showed him the photograph of a man I’d just met, saying, “It’s crazy but I keep thinking I’m going to marry him” – and I did.
I was there when Karl left Brown for Julliard, and, years later, when he came out as gay. Karl knew my parents, my cousins, my first husband and the other friends who have been important in my life, as I knew and know his. I visit his mother in a nursing home just as I’d visit my own, were she still alive. We can refer to anything and anyone in our pasts without having to explain.
If I’m upset about something, I call him; I trust his judgment, though I might not always follow his advice. And finally, maybe most of all, there’s comfort. I feel completely comfortable in his home, and when I’m around him, I can be completely and unselfconsciously myself.
It’s not that we don’t get on each other’s nerves. It’s that we do. A cartoon about a married couple could have been about us: A woman standing in the kitchen is saying to the man before her, “Is there anything else I can do wrong for you?” I sometimes feel that whatever I do within Karl’s view, he’ll suggest I do a different way.

All the elements making our friendship so close that Karl is like a brother were threaded through the accounts of people I interviewed. “We’re close” could mean they talk about anything; or that they see each other often; or that, though they don’t see each other often, when they do, it’s as though no time has passed: They just pick up where they left off. And sometimes “close” meant none of the above, but that they have a special connection, a connection of the heart.

There were also differences in what “anything” meant, in the phrase “We can talk about anything.” Paradoxically, it could be either very important, very personal topics, or insignificant details. A woman said of a friend, “We’re not that close; we wouldn’t talk about problems in our kids’ lives,” but, of another, “We’re not that close; we wouldn’t talk about what we’re having for dinner.”
“Like family” can mean dropping in and making plans without planning: You might call up and say, “I just made lasagna. Why don’t you come over for dinner?” Or you can invite yourself: “I’m feeling kind of low. Can I come over for dinner?”
Many grown children continue to wish that their parents or siblings could see them for who they really are, not who they wish them to be. This goal can be realized in friendship. “She gets me,” a woman said of a friend. “When I’m with her I can be myself.”
It would be easy to idealize family-like friendship as all satisfaction and cheer. And maybe for some lucky people it is. But friends can also resemble family by driving you crazy in similar ways. Why does she insist on washing dishes by hand when dishwashers do a better job of killing germs? Why does he always come exactly five minutes late?

Just as with literal families, friends who are like family can bring not only happiness but also pain, because the comfort of a close bond can sometimes morph into the restraints of bondage. The closer the bond, the greater the power to hurt – by disappointing, letting you down or, the ultimate betrayal, by dying. When a friend dies, a part of you dies, too, as you lose forever the experiences, the jokes, the references that you shared. A woman in her 70s who was mourning her lifelong best friend said the worst part was not being able to call her up and tell her how terrible she felt about her dying.

Sometimes we come to see friends as family because members of the family we grew up with live far away or feel too different, or are just too difficult to deal with. A woman who ended all contact with a sister explained that the option of cutting off a family member who brings you grief is a modern liberation, like the freedom to choose a spouse or divorce one. Holes left by rejected (or rejecting) relatives — or left by relatives lost to distance, death or circumstance — can be filled by friends who are like family. But family-like friends don’t have to be filling holes at all. Like my friend Karl, they can simply add richness, joy and, yes, at times, aggravation, that a literal family – in my case, two sisters I’m very close to — also provides.