how to salvage a faltering friendship

Why Relationships Go Bad

• If you realize that every long-term relationship will have its difficult times, you'll not be as likely to jump ship when your friendship is yawning and pitching.
• if you have invested heavily in a deep relationship - a friendship or a marriage - don't junk it too quickly. It probably can be fixed.
• Consider a relationship which you feel could be satisfactory yet leaves much to be desired. Take the bull by the horns. Simply ask the ... person,"What do i overlook in our relationship which is obvious to you?" Listen attentively to the answer even if you do not agree with it. Take time to think about it.
• You must have a certain moral certitude to admit you are wrong. Because relationships are the most difficult things we attempt in this life, of course we will make mistakes in them. And when we do, we can save ourselves considerable misery by apologizing.
• If your relationships seem to be shorting out regularly, you might do well to ask if your neurotic patterns of relating are causing the problem.
• For instance, we sometimes see others through the filter of past memories. A person reminds us of someone we once knew, or we get flashbacks to some failure in a similar relationship.
• Each of us has a craving for emotional nurture, and along the way each of us has acquired a bagful of tricks for getting it.
• survey your relationships to see if old neurotic patterns, which once worked with someone else, have now become counterproductive.

Creative Forgiveness

• faltering relationships can usually be salvaged. Occasionally you realize you're in a poisonous one, where for your sanity you must withdraw, but most often, broken relationships stay broken for the lack of a patience that will let the other person go through a period of temporary insanity.
• the dangerous thing about bitterness, slander, wrangling, malice, and the whole cargo.... is that these attitudes eat away at us like acid. Not only does our own bitterness slop out on those around us and corrode our relationships, it also eats away at our own souls.
• You can't be free and happy if you harbor grudges, so put them away. Get rid of them. Collect postage stamps or movies posters or coins, if you wish, but don't collect grudges.
• It is curious what a short memory we have for our own mistakes, and what a long one we have for the mistakes of others.
• If we are to forgive freely, we need a tolerance of others as generous as that tolerance we display towards our own errors.
• Someone has said that we judge others for what they did and ourselves for what we intended.

--- quoted from "The Friendship Factor" by Alan Loy Mcginnis