The Friendship Solution: Making Friends and Dropping Frenemies
About this ebook
From the prepublication reviews:
“I'm sleeping better after reading this book.” Reader Review
“I like how thoughts run into each other; they form a cohesive explanation. You come by it so simply. I imagine many people stop and think: ‘They express what I have thought all along, but could not put into words.’” Reader Review
“I had goosebumps. This was so true, to the point....” Reader Review
“I love how comprehensive this book is.” Reader Review
From the Introduction:
One day, as we were reading an email to our advice column Direct Answers, Tamara looked up and said simply, “She doesn’t know what a friend is.”
That line—she doesn’t know what a friend is—has come back to us again and again as we read letters about a problem with a friend. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, that is how The Friendship Solution began.
We wrote this book for two reasons.
First, when many people use the word “friend,” they are actually describing a frenemy, a person they dislike, a rival or an antagonist, or a person who manipulates them. They are not talking about a true friend, someone they know and like, someone they can trust to have their back.
Understanding this distinction is one of the keys to having a good life. But understanding this distinction is not enough. We must act on it.
That is the second purpose of this book. We want to explain why we need to sort people out based on where they should fit in our life.
Some dictionaries define a friend as someone we know well and like, exclusive of sexual or family ties. In this regard, dictionaries are behind the times. More and more, psychologists are seeing our friends, family, and romantic relationships not as fundamentally different but as tributaries of the same river.
That is why when we speak of friends in this book, we include traditional friends as well as relatives and romantic partners.
The Friendship Solution is about the place of friendship in all our relationships. It is about why we have friends, what a good friend is, learning to say no, and letting go of bad friends.
Through letters and research, we will paint a portrait of friendship as it is and as it should be.
Finally, this book is a long answer to a short letter, a letter we got on the day Tamara looked up from an email and said, “She doesn’t know what a friend is.”
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About the author
Wayne and Tamara Mitchell are the authors of Direct Answers, a weekly relationship advice column. The column was begun in April 1999 and within two years appeared in newspapers in more than a dozen countries.
With a column that was limited to 650 words, Wayne and Tamara couldn't spare the words for 'Dear Wayne and Tamara' or 'Sincerely Yours', or 'Sleepless in Seattle'. This allowed for more from the letter writer and more for the advice.
Reading each letter is like sticking your hand into a box of unknown contents. When you confront the letter writer's problem, you learn what the box contains, and consider how you might deal with it.
That is what advice is all about--turning the advice over in your mind and deciding if it makes sense to you. You decide if it touches you or not. You decide if it really offers help, or if it is just the same old thing with no understanding behind it.
That is how you determine the quality of the advice giver.
Wayne & Tamara live in the American Midwest with their rescue dog Riley, a 10 lb. shih tzu mix. Wayne has always been an active hiker and camper. Tamara is a breast cancer survivor.
