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

Band 90-100: Elected Features for a Selected Friend

        Considering humans as social beings, there are certain and crucial requirements for them to survive, ranging from fundamental physical necessities to emotional ones. These emotional needs are based on building healthy relations with others as a part of the psychological aspect of human life. As is known, relation is the bonds in family, between spouses, even colleagues and of course between friends. There is no possible way to determine our parents, still we can be quite selective on the matter of accepting someone as a friend. Although, there are several specific features we look for on someone to build up the friendship bonds, the following three would be the basic but common ones for many; personality, point of view and life style. 

        First of all, it is certainly inevitable to observe the personality of someone before setting up a close relationship with him/her. Indeed, there are various attitudes that can be treated as the components of personality such as being supportive, trustworthy, thoughtful, forgiving, genuine and kind. For instance, having supportive and kind manner may be the essential ones for some considering that people need emotional support in most cases and wish to have it in the kindest way possible. In similar to this, being accused of the unintentional mistakes is purely severe; therefore, a person who is forgiving and gracious would be what many people look for. Another point to consider is that, imagine someone who is far away from being judgmental conversely and s/he cares about other`s thoughts by being a good listener, all could determine the significance of personality of a desired friend.

        Secondly, another crucial point to take into consideration while choosing a friend is perception of life. To be clearer, it is the fact that people see and approach the events and others in numerous ways. For instance, people tend to see the glass either half full or half empty. This perspective may determine whether someone seeks the good and illustrates the bright side both in people and in themselves. In relation to this, the attitude of a person towards the life would basically influence the others around. Indeed, “the way the people around us respond to stressful events — whether those people react negatively or positively — may be contagious” *, a new study says. Therefore, to avoid negative thoughts and to embrace a healthy and glamorous mind and life, it is critical to opt someone who is glowing with a sparkling light and inspires around to be the same.

       Thirdly, it is possible to count the life style as a distinctive determiner in point of choosing a friend. Certain habits like eating healthy food, sleeping times, engaging in profitable issues in spare times could be thought as the life style. In particular, the activities or hobbies one perform in his/her spare time are extremely important because people generally spend their free time together by doing the things they enjoy. If two people do not have any kind of pleasure in common, probably, having time together will be suffering for them. Another point to take into account is eating habits. Since there could be wide variety of food choices range from healthy, organic to rubbish, fast-food types, it is essential to select someone who shares the similar eating habits. As it will eventually influence your body and health. Hence, the way we choose to live the life had better be similar to him/her whom we choose as a friend.

        All in all, personality, point of view and life style could be the foremost criteria inquired by the majority before commencing to build up a friendship. Therefore, it is highly important to bear in mind them with respect to one`s priority. As point of view and life style are bound to personality, they could be shaped or built according to personality. Hence, it is highly possible to suggest that personality could be the one which is mostly required to be prioritized. Yet, being over selective could result in solitude, impact of which is negative on people`s daily lives. As Mark Twain stated “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide with it” *. The key point is to hold the balance between being fussy or being hasty for the purpose of living and cherishing the life with its entire sense.

  

References

*1: www.livescience.com/28877-negative-thoughts-depression-contagious.html

*2: www.quotationspage.com/quote/31084.html 

by Sema Akbaş 1st year ELT Student @ Erciyes University