When A Best Friend Is Better Than A Boyfriend

When looking for love, there’s no better training ground than having a best friend; it’s in a relationship with a best friend that we can learn about love and get the skills we need to be someone’s partner for life.

Women have argued with me that because they presently don’t have a boyfriend, they can’t work on their relationship skills. They feel they have to have a man in their life to practice on.

While having a man to work out our “stuff” with is helpful, it’s really best if we take care of it out BEFORE we get involved in a romance. But many of us believe that a relationship with a boyfriend is different than our other relationships and therefore we can’t do that. That’s not entirely true.

Let’s look at some common areas where we may need help before we meet The One. Many of us deal with the fear of abandonment, the inability to speak up for ourselves, or the tendency to give too much of ourselves in a relationship. If we “work” on these issues with our boyfriend or a man we’ve just started dating, they can be a barrier to love. And this will be multiplied if the man has many of his own problems to work out as well.

When we don’t do the work before we meet the guy, our relationships will have a lot of ups and downs — and a lot of drama.

So doesn’t it seem much better to learn the skills we’ll need to have a long lasting relationship from a best friend? Of course it does, and this is how they can teach us about love.

I think we can agree that with our best friends we’re less judgmental, more forgiving and more flexible than we are in our love lives. This is in part because we don’t feel we have as much at stake, but really we do. How we treat anyone in our lives has everything to do with our ability to love.

Here are 3 ways our best friends can help us with our boyfriends:

1. We can learn better communication skills: we can practice being more truthful and authentic because we know they value us and they easily accept who we are.
2. We can learn to “let go” with a best friend and not be so clingy. We can lessen the fear that just because someone isn’t always around, it doesn’t mean they don’t love us.
3. We can learn to be more accepting, because God knows, our friends are not like us. They do things we’d never do, say things we’d never say and think things we’d never think. Yet, we accept these things and don’t try to change them. We actually enjoy their “foibles” and don’t take them personally.

There is no one better than a good woman friend to each us about love and make us aware of how good it could be if we didn’t “over-react” with men!

We’ll never get over all our fears and problems, but we will be able to lessen them so they show up less often. Then instead of wasting time in the ups and downs and drama, we’ll be using the time for what we really want — for love.