You often hear the saying, “You get what you work for” or something similar to that. A lot of times, sayings like these fall on deaf ears, because they may not apply to us at that moment. It’s not until you come face to face with something you didn’t work for or put the effort into, that you start to hold some accountability.

For me, one of those moments was in my 9th grade English honors class. Up until this point, I had gotten away putting in minimal effort, and still getting good grades. Not for much longer though. 

For someone like me who enjoys writing, a project like this should have been a breeze. If I remember correctly, the task was to compile eight or ten stories based on different things that were near and dear to you. I’ll be honest, I think I wrote maybe two. For some reason, I thought I could get away with it. Lord knows what kind of power I thought I had then. 

When it came time to present our stories, I made up some lame excuse as to why I didn’t have my work completed. My teacher then told me, “People get into the honors class because they put in the work to be here.” 

I don’t know why this story popped into my head last night, but it ties in perfectly with this next part of the series on navigating friendships. 

We put in time and effort towards our passions, our jobs, and our interpersonal relationships. 

For the longest time, especially at a young age, it was easy to see your friends at school, sports practices, or camps, and that was all you needed. 

As we get older, we look for friendships with people that have similar lifestyles and values. If these are friends you’ve also known for a long time, even better. It’s an amazing thing when friends can still grow as individuals, while also growing together in a stronger friendship. 

It can get a bit stickier when this isn’t the case. 

A lot of friendships grow apart over time, and I don’t think most of us are prepared for that. Nothing ever remains constant, so even if the friendship doesn’t dissolve forever, there are some points of imbalance throughout the friendship. Because of the different priorities we pick up over time, this imbalance is typically within the realm of effort. 

If you’ve experienced this in your own life, you’ve likely been on either side of the coin: being the person who is putting in most of the effort or being the person who puts in little to no effort. 

No one side is right or wrong when there’s an imbalance of efforts, but it does offer some room for curiosity:

Have you always been on the same side of the coin or do you flip flop depending on the person? Do you put in more effort out of fear of losing the friendship? Do you avoid the effort and choose to distance yourself from others? 

Putting aside having priorities such as jobs, families and personal hobbies, when we have some friction within our closest friendships, it’s something I would hope you would want to resolve. We put in effort into the things we care about and want the most. After all, human connection is one of the most powerful things we have in this lifetime. Why wouldn’t we want to foster healthy friendships? 

I’ve had experiences where I was on both ends of the coin, and I think it was primarily due to the reasons I had mentioned before: fear of losing friendships and purposely distancing myself. A last one I’ll add is that I think I was afraid to be honest of where I was in life out of fear that they wouldn’t understand. This may or may not sound a bit extreme, considering I have very understanding friends. But that alone is one of the reasons why last week’s topic, the idea of holding space, ties so perfectly into effort, why it matters, and what it may look like:

• Effort can really look like anything. It can be a phone call, texts, making plans, etc. In the experience I just described, my effort ended up being in the form of honesty. Being transparent with my friends to say why I was distancing myself or why I felt that I was always the one carrying the weight. 
• While on one hand you’re putting in effort to honestly communicate how you’re feeling, it goes both ways because you have to make an effort to understand where the other person is coming from. Oftentimes when we don’t want to hear something, or admit where we were wrong, it’s easy to not want to see the other person’s point of view. That is where the effort comes in. I’m not saying that every conversation with a friend needs to be a heavy one where you open up about every single little thing, that’s no fun at all. In times of friction though, wouldn’t it make it a lot easier to resolve? 

Writing about efforts in friendships isn’t the easiest task, because like I mentioned last week, I’m still learning as I go. I have friendships where effort looks like different things everyday. One isn’t better than the other, but I’m still putting in time into something I care about. 

As I mentioned earlier, nothing remains constant. Friendships that have always been in balance will at some point face an imbalance. We change and evolve over time, and allowing those changes to come in is important, because you’re allowing that imbalance to happen. If that friendship is a connection that can withstand it, then your honesty and understanding will need to be a part of that. If not, it doesn’t mean that the connection will permanently sever, it may just require some time and space until that imbalance eventually balances itself out naturally. 

While my 9th grade English class may not be of similar importance, I think the message still carries through: those that want to be in your life, will put the time and effort in to be there.