Band 90-100: Best Decisions and Best Friends

My grandfather always says ‘the bond of communion is more significant than kindredship’.  Kindredship, blood relationship, is involuntary but friendship is in your hands. Real friends are like your siblings without ties of blood. Sometimes, your friend knows you better and h/she is closer than your relatives or even your family.  Besides, you choose the person to be your friend whom you will build strong and deep bonds. How strong the bond of friendship depends on how you choose your friends. Choosing a friend wisely makes camaraderie last forever, however, choosing him/her carelessly makes it go down in flames.  That is why criteria of choosing friends are immensely crucial. In parallel with this, there are some criteria about what makes a person a good friend. By taking into account his or her characteristics, life style and point of view, you can decide whether a person will be a good friend or not.

First of all, for choosing a superb friend, one of the remarkable and pivotal criteria should be characteristics. The steadier his/her characteristics are, the more durable your friendship would be. S/he should be understanding when you make a mistake or take a decision. A real friend thinks that you have a strong reason for what you did or asks why you did so and tries to understand your situation. Otherwise, h/she can easily cut the painter in every mistake you made. Likewise, a friend should not be revengeful after you do something wrong. Such a negative and hazardous personality can harm both of you. Also, a real friend is not self-seeker as your success should be his/her happiness. If not, friendship does not last for a long time. For instance, I had a friend who blamed me for being overambitious whenever I wanted to get higher marks and I was happy, she would be upset and said I was selfish and did not understand how she felt. In such circumstances, friendship would probably end with an irrelevant pretext. When considering the criteria for choosing a friend, characteristics of your potential friend can play a big part in it.

Secondly, life style is another crucial criterion for choosing a real friend. The proverb ‘if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas’ verifies this criterion. How they live can have an enormous impact on your life, your friendship and your personality. Specifically, a true friend should not have bad habits such as smoking, drinking alcohol. Even if you avoid these habits, after a while, such bad habits would seem good and you would get used to them. Indeed, the significant reason for getting into the habit of smoking and alcohol or drug dependency is mainly related to choosing friends carelessly. Moreover, if you are shy and asocial, it is important to have a friend who always socializes with people and loves outdoors. Such friends could provide you to get rid of your shyness and to learn how to communicate. Importantly, having hobbies that both can enjoy would improve your friendship. Hereby, you can have good time and become real friends in time. Also, h/she knows what can entertain you when you are in a bad mood. By looking at such details, life style can definitely be a decisive criterion to take into consideration while picking a friend.

Lastly, the less effective but consequential criterion for choosing a friend is point of view of your potential friend. Friends may have different enjoyments, and they may (dis)like different things nevertheless they would not be close friends unless they have similar point of view to yours. If a thing is absolutely wrong for one and the thing is certainly wrong for another, one day, they would conflict with each other. In particular, doing something behind someone’s back or lying should be wrong for both of them. Also, your friend’s point of view on life impacts you. It is significant that your friend is whether optimistic or pessimistic. Joel Osteen says ‘’you cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.’’ Accordingly, negative people consume your energy of life. Moreover, if a person thinks himself/herself superior, it is difficult to be his/her friend because the person cannot accept that h/she is wrong or you are better at something. Such a friend always underestimates you and causes to lose your self-confidence.  Although people do not exactly pay attention to point of view when they choose a friend, it influences not only friendship but also their life.

In a nutshell, choosing a person whom you can call a real friend can probably be based on his/her characteristics, life style and point of view. Of course, we do not think about the criteria while becoming friends at first. However, these criteria might help you decide how you can select a person whom you will let him/her know all about you and have remarkable effects on your lives. Especially, characteristic has great importance in friendship because it determines their life style and point of view. In addition, characteristics are corner stones of camaraderie and steady characteristics lay the foundations of strong friendship. If you bear this criterion in mind when choosing a friend, your friendship stays strong for years like a well based building. As Rashida Rowe said ‘friends are angels who lift our feet when our own wings have trouble remembering how to fly.’


by Zarife Nur Göveç 1st year ELT student @ Erciyes University