By Claire Marie Scott | LTVN Executive Producer
So much of the college experience is centered around the friendships that we create. College is a time where many find life-long friendships are formed that help us grow as we go from teenagers to young adults.
When we look back on our time in college, we will remember the memories created with our friends, not every single little thing they did for us.
When creating and preserving friendships, it’s important to remember that friendships are not about keeping score — we should be diligent to show grace and love to the people in our lives.
It is natural for us to constantly be in a state of comparison, and that does not stop short with our friends. I have heard people constantly keeping track of what their friends haven’t done for them, and feeling like they are pouring into the friend more than being pour back into.
Now, I am not excusing someone being a bad friend and completely ignoring you while you give them everything. Rather, it becomes exhausting to over analyze our friendships and expect everything that we do to be repaid immediately.
Philippians 2:3 urges us to “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” If we are continually looking for ways that our friends can be doing better for us, this isn’t valuing others.
If a friend isn’t behaving as they usually do, it is more important to have a conversation than hold little things against them. As disciples of Christ, we should be quick to value others and serve them, even when it isn’t 100% reciprocated.
An interview done by NPR highlights the importance of not keeping score. “The key is to focus less on them and more on you … And learn to develop a benefit of the doubt. Assume the best of your friends.”
Developing a habit of giving the benefit of the doubt helps our hearts to not be hardened by the ways our friends aren’t serving us, but instead allows us to look outwardly into why the friend might be not acting how they usually do.
A Psychology Today article from Dr. Kathleen Smith discusses that, “Keeping score is one way that we maintain distance in anxious relationships.” Keeping score creates a division in friendship, with one side who might not know the cause.
This cycle can cause us to change our behavior for the worse while building resentment in our hearts. If our friend is a good person, we should be more focused on that, rather than what actions haven’t been taken.
The next time you feel like a friend isn’t reciprocating in the way that they normally would, allow the little things to be brushed aside in persistence of a genuine friendship, and not one where there are tallies marked next to names.
