I Have a Select Social Circle Where Honesty Is a Must
Wanting your circle of friends or your most trusted people to exercise honesty and to be trustworthy does not make you a “snob” or a manipulative person. It means you know what you want and don’t want to waste valuable time, your own or someone else’s.
Maybe you have relationships that you keep for too long for simple convenience. He who never gives will some day end up exhausting even the most patient friend, and he who gives little and gives it badly will only create tension.
Expect from others at least half of what you do for them, not out of convenience but rather self-esteem. If it is true that relationships are not mathematical, they are also not “paranormal matters.” Know how to say “no” to someone who has never done anything so you can give a “yes” to those who really deserve it.
Selecting your circle is being intelligent
Sometimes, setting limits on our patience opens our tolerance to things that do deserve it. Putting up with liars, arrogant people, and those who do not seem to want the best for us for days, months, and years is not that great of an idea, is it?
We are always going to run into people who put us down. They may be our bosses or someone in our family. If it is one of these kinds of relationships, it may be more complicated to cut them off. But we are not talking about that right now. We are talking about those people you can get out of your life, the ones who make your life uncomfortable and do not make up for anything that you offer them. You just keep the relationship going for appearances, out of fear, or due to a lack of self-esteem.
Dealing with people who do not bring anything to our lives results in withered relationships. It is like watering flowers with bleach. It looks like you are watering them, but you are really poisoning them slowly.
A planned image for our relationships
As we grow, evolve, or change, most of us modify our social relationships, especially close ones. If we like having many different relationships during adolescence and early adulthood, when we reach later adulthood, we tend to prefer quality over quantity, thus considering honesty an essential ingredient for our relationships. We do not have as much time, and the time we do have, we want to spend with people who enrich us.
If we look around, society tells us we have to create a personal brand, that it must be as enticing as possible for others. We have to make a flawless profile that includes not only our work life, but also our personal. We must be like a competitive product, even though this may not be authentic.
“Contact” through the Internet and social networks puts us in a complicated situation. It seems like we have to carry on dealing with people that we no longer have anything in common with. This all encourages a flagrant hypocrisy in our lives that makes us dedicate time to people we do not like spending even a second on.
We must once again point out that we do not want to fall into a false idealism: it is simply a matter of urging ourselves, as much as possible, to avoid anything that brings nothing to our lives.
What is it you seek? Look for it without guilt
There are many people with a histrionic, narcissistic tendency, who tend to surround themselves with relationships that bring them fame, popularity, or contacts. In this way, the relationships become less natural and turn into a medium, as artificial as technology, for achieving other ends.
On the other hand, most of us look for relationships as ends in themselves. They can make our brief passage through this world more pleasant, but nothing more. As such, if you are looking for true relationships, if that is really what you want for yourself, ask for nothing less.
If we have a right to something in this life, it is to trying not to hurt ourselves. This happens by distancing ourselves away from things that make us feel bad.
Maybe you, too, stopped being a good friend at one point. You wore out their patience, bored them with your conversations, or your mere presence was no longer pleasing to them. Despite all this, you stay, you managed to put up with it. As such, do not doubt your effort to surround yourself with honesty and simplicity in your relationships, although they may go through hard times.
