According to Healthline.com, intimacy is closeness between people in personal relationships. Your friendship needs this element to thrive. It is important to build intimacy with your friends because it makes your relationship better and more valuable. People don’t usually understand how to develop a bond with their friends, and this article will teach you how to.
Building intimacy in friendship requires effort and patience. It doesn’t happen in one day. All your seemingly little efforts will add up and make you a beautiful relationship with your friends. One thing lack of intimacy will do is cause a strain in important relationships in your life.
Many people usually ask that shouldn’t it just happen naturally? It won’t work that way. It requires work, intentional work at that.
Many times, we forget that consistency matters and continuity is important too. Why? Because it strengthens intimacy in friendship. With a strengthened bond, it would be easier for friends to navigate life together.
Friendship requires sacrifice, unconditional love, compromise, openness, understanding, kindness, patience, trust, transparency, authenticity, respect, loyalty, intentionality. The list is endless.
It appears the older generation understood what intimacy in friendship entailed. They understood how important longevity was to their relationships and worked hard to make things work. These ones stood by one another in the good times and didn’t back off in the bad times. And now, many of them can boast of being stronger together. Why? Because they leveraged on their relationships and invested in themselves. There are examples all around us of people who have maintained friendships for decades.
How do you build intimacy in friendship?
Find good people you can grow with and don’t take them for granted by letting them go easily. Love them as hard as you would love that celebrity crush, and even better. You should hold on tightly to them so that you will not be filled with regrets at the end of the day.
Communicate clearly about everything in order to avoid assumptions. Assumptions will unnecessarily elongate small issues and could ruin your relationship.
Be loyal to your friends. The worst thing you can do to your friends is to break their trust. Don’t lie to them. Don’t show up in the good times and desert them when the going gets tough.
Show appreciation and let them know how they mean to you. Send them gifts. Write mails to them. Pay them a visit as often as you can. Pray for them. Celebrate with them. Let them know you care.
Be intentional about building friendship. Because someone is your friend already doesn’t mean that you should not put in efforts to make it work.
When you don’t service a car, it will not function properly. So it is with relationships. Give it all it takes regardless of the distance. Don’t be a parasite. Give value as you receive value. Meet them where they are. It should be 100-100, not 50-50 because they are not your friends to complete you. They are here to grow with you. Don’t take your closeness for granted.
One other way to build intimacy in friendship is to avoid chasing clout and having so many friends without reasons. Having so many friends without definition is unhealthy for you. Also, trying to forcefully identify with every person you come across and making them your close friends or giving them access to you is not in any way wise. It only tells a lot about how inconsistent you can be.
Be a safe space for them to hide. Don’t share their secrets with others because they trusted you enough to keep their secrets secret.
Be the best friend they could ever have, that’s how you can get the best out of them. Don’t snitch on them. Stay true to them.
Invest in your friends. Buy books for them. Buy courses for them. Introduce them to opportunities and people that matter.
When there’s an argument, the unhealthy thing to do it is to hold grudges. Tell yourselves and each other the truth. Yes, the truth might hurt sometimes, but tell it regardless. It’s disloyal to lie to each other.
Do not change your friends like clothes. The more you do this the more it tells something odd about you. You would get tired eventually if you keep changing friends. There will be very little or no intimacy at all. That’s unhealthy and unwise.
Cherish your friends. Value them. Don’t give them the “see-finish” vibe.
Respect them by respecting their boundaries. When they say no, it’s no. Don’t push unnecessarily hard. Emphasis on unnecessarily.
Have meaningful conversations with them. Know what their dreams are, what their interests are, what values they uphold, what their dream job is, what they think about an important topic and many more meaningful conversations.
To build intimacy in friendship, you must be open and get help when you need it. Don’t have friends and suffer in silence as if you don’t have friends. There’s very little walking on eggshells will do for you. Be vulnerable to them. Let them see sides to you that random people would normally not see.
Another one is, support your friends. Show them off. Hype them. Talk about what they do. Talk about them. You know the way you’ll show off your celebrity role model and say good things about them, that’s the way it should be for your friends. Don’t be ashamed of their little beginnings. Remember that you all are a work in progress, and you’re growing together. Mention their name where it matters. Sell their abilities, their services and products if they have any. That’s how to support them.
Ask them simple but important questions like “How do you want to be loved?” “What can I do to help you?”
Share resources that matter, to them. It could be a book, a link to a blog post, a podcast episode, job opportunities, YouTube videos. It could be anything