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Understanding the Value of Friendship Leads to HappinessThe value of friendship, a true meaningful friendship, is hard to describe. A friend
Having a friend you can count on is a gift, a blessing, one of the most important assets your heart has. We all need friends. Remember the last time your heart hurt, your stomach in knots, uncertainty running rampant. What friend did you call? Think of the many people who sit alone night after night with no one to talk with, no one to share their troubled heart. What about all the homeless? How many friends do you know that would let a friend become homeless? Whether you’re a kid or an aging senior, everyone needs friendship. For kids without friends, life is miserable. Here's an exceptional story that drives the point home about teenage friendship. It brought tears to my eyes. And kids who don’t learn the art of making friends, of cultivating friendships, become teens and young adults with the same problem. It’s almost impossible to get a good paying job in a field you love without having the ability to get along well with others. When kids learn ways to make friends early in life it gives them the jumping off place for ways to make friends easily as an adult. The value of friendship cannot be expressed always in tangibles, i.e., you can’t place a monetary value on it. Yet kids who discover the benefits of friendship when young know the importance of friendship and seek it in their life as adults. Of course there are advantages and disadvantages of friendship 
but the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, and clearly show the importance of friendship. Making friends and having true friends adds to your long term happiness. Sometimes we don't know the power of friendship and how extending friendship to others affects them. But take away a friendship, through death, and you remember the real value of friendship. No longer can you call your friend, no longer is she there with wise words of wisdom to comfort your grieving heart. No longer can she share her personal life story that relates exactly to what you’re experiencing. You don’t replace a dear friend, a beautiful friendship, with another. Sure, you can add more friends, but each friend has her own special place in your heart that is reserved only for her. The value of friendship is in direct proportion to the amount of time and energy you invest in the friendship. Make yourself vulnerable, be real and authentic, and your friend can give you more of herself as well. Deep communion with another is holy and sacred, special, not something to be taken for granted. It’s so easy in our stressed, fast paced, hectic lives to neglect some of our most important responsibilities, but never neglect your friends. That is if you wish to maintain friends. People who grasp the true meaning of friendship remember not only the
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