Life is Better When You are an Amazing Friend

Everything in life is easier when you have a great group of girlfriends to experience it with. You are there for each other, you laugh at and with one another and you can count on each other to cheer you on, hold your hand and lend you a shoulder. Good friends are irreplaceable and unexplainable. You know your friends are there for you through anything, but are you there for them? Difficult times, busy schedules and life changes often take a toll on friendships, and it can become quite easy to forget to be a good friend from time to time. Here are a few tips to make sure you are being just as amazing to your friends as they are to you.

Stop With the Advice Already

Offering your advice can be useful and it can be bad. When your friend comes to you with a problem and you do nothing but offer her advice, you become a know it all. Sometimes your friends want nothing more than just a listening ear. They are perfectly capable of working through their problems on their own and only want you to listen. Refrain from offering your advice unless you are specifically asked.

Show a Little More

You develop friendships in a number of areas of your life. You have your childhood friends, your college friends, your work friends and your relationship friends (you know what we mean: If you are attached you probably have couple friends, if you are married you have married friends, if you have kids you have your friends with kids). However, most of your friends probably don’t know the others. Your kid friends know you as a mom and wife. Your couple friends know you as a couple. Your childhood friends have the best stories about the time you had braces, four-inch thick glasses and a mullet. Your friends are – undoubtedly – going to have a great time when they get together at a party. They’ll all see a side of you they may not know so well, and they’ll all think you’re just a little more awesome because of it.

Be Happy

When your girlfriend lands her dream job and a salary that means she can have whatever she wants for the rest of her life, be happy for her (if you can’t be genuinely happy for another person’s success then you may need to delve deeper into your own life to figure out what it is that makes you unhappy enough not to be happy for others, but that’s a completely different article). Your friends need you there when something bad happens and they need a shoulder to cry on, but they also need you there to pop the cork on a bottle of good champagne and jump up and down while giggling with excitement over engagements, job offers and amazing new opportunities.