One of the things we talk about A LOT over here in our house full of teenagers is how to know if someone is for you.
What does that look like? What does it mean? What is the difference between someone who is our friend and a friend who is for me? Because while someone can be both, they are absolutely not the same thing.
We talk about this a lot over here because it was in my early mom days, the stage where many of you are, that I began to dig deep and figure this out and wrapping my mind and heart around this has been absolutely transformative in my life. It has changed my friendships and it’s changed the way I mother my kids. It transformed me back then when I started to understand it, and it is still changing me and making me a better mom and friend and a better mom friend today!
So what happened back in those early days when I was a young mom and I began my journey with this?
Well. When my kids were really little, I would come home from a playdate or meeting mom friends out for coffee or lunch and I’d put my babies down to nap and collapse on the sofa and there were QUESTIONS that kept bouncing around in my head as I laid there thinking about the outing I’d just had. I was making friends and trying to find my way as a mom. I SO wanted to make friends and I wanted to be loved and accepted and not judged and I wanted to be a good friend myself.
Here’s what I kept asking:
Why do I feel so comfortable with some friends, and not with others?
Why do I feel weird and icky and unsure about myself when I spend time with certain friends?
Why are some relationships so life-giving to me and others absolutely drain me?
Why do I avoid texting back some friends, but the MINUTE I get a text from others, I can’t wait to respond and say yes and engage and move mountains to hang out with them?
It’s taken many years of wrestling with this, but after a lot of time thinking on this, and processing it and now, with many years of experience making and keeping friends…
Here are:
Four ways to know someone is for you.
When I look back on my life and friendships, the very best mom friends I’ve had, the friends that I have now, the people that I want to be around, and the friendships that last and stay healthy and grow and are completely life-giving to me? Those friendships, at the core, have all four of these things.
Do we always live these out perfectly? No. Of course not. Not a single one of us is a perfect friend. There is just no such thing.
But if I want to ask myself the question? Is this person, or is this friend FOR me? If that answer is yes, then I can trace it back to these four things:
1. I know where I stand with them.
When a friend is for me, when I walk into a room, a coffee shop, onto a playground, into her house, out to dinner with our husbands or families, I don’t wonder when I walk in how they are going to see me. I don’t wonder if they’re going to size me up and something about me or our friendship means I”m going to immediately wonder if I’ve done something wrong. I don’t think back, “Did I forget to text them back?”, “Did I do something wrong?” I’m not scanning through this mental inventory of memories trying to figure out if she and I are ok.
I just know. I know where I stand. I know that I’m loved, wanted and accepted.
Their eyes greet me with a knowing look that says, “It’s you. I’m your girl. I got you. I’m so glad you’re here!” No wondering. No faking it. No plastic smile. I just know. I’m me. I’m loved. And I’m wanted. And also, they don’t have to be fake with me. If I walk into a room and one of my girls – her head is down and she looks sad or didn’t see me, I just go over to her and ask her. “Hey what’s up? You good?” These friends have my permission to have a bad day. After all, every situation in my life isn’t about me.
I don’t need a welcome committee.
I don’t need fanfare.
What I need is to know that when I walk in the room, I know where exactly I stand with them.
And I think this is really important to note here. Are my friends that are for me always happy with me? Of course not. We are true and real friends. True friends are not always happy with one another. But we deal with those things when they come, we handle them with grace for one another, and deep in my heart, out to coffee, when it’s just the two of us or a room full of people, I know where I stand with them.
This leads me to number two:
2. They don’t place unspoken expectations on me.
This is important in every season of life and every season of friendship, but never more important than when you are a new mom with newborns and babies and toddlers. There are already so many expectations placed on you by just the nature of your daily job – just being a mom – that when you have a friend who is placing additional expectations on you, it’s really hard.
“Why didn’t you text me back?”
“Why haven’t you called me?”
“So you had time to go to the gym but not time for coffee with me?”
Those are direct, right? They just say it. Essentially, I had expectations of you and you failed.
Ouch.
But sometimes, it’s the unspoken expectations that are hardest to navigate.
Let me give you an illustration to explain this. I first heard this in our marriage counseling before I got married, but it has helped me SO much in thinking about unspoken expectations in all of my relationships and friendships.
Let’s say you have a husband and a wife. They have just gotten back from their honeymoon and life is great and they’re so excited to set up house and get settled into their new home. Leaning against the wall in the foyer are several framed photos that need to be hung up. Over the next couple of weeks every day the wife gets up and she comes downstairs and she passes by the picture frames still leaning against the wall and still on the ground. She’s getting madder by the day. She makes her coffee and she sits down in the kitchen, and a few minutes later, her husband comes downstairs, and he walks past the foyer and he kind of huffs and puffs because the picture frames are still on the floor, leaning against the wall where they’ve been for weeks. He comes into the kitchen and makes his coffee kind of still huffing and puffing and they don’t say much and they both head out the door for work. They’re annoyed, right? On a scale of 1-10, we are reaching mad level five at this point because it’s been weeks and the pictures are still there on the floor, in the foyer, but neither of them want to talk about it.
What has happened here? This is a classic example of unspoken expectations. In the husband’s family, his mom always hung the pictures on the wall. She liked things the way she liked them and so she got the hammer and the nails and she hung the pictures on the wall, and that was the end of it. In the wife’s family, her Dad always hung the pictures. He was the one with the toolbox after all. He owned the hammer. She watched her dad love and serve her mom by always hanging the pictures on the wall.
Who is at fault here? No one really, right? It’s just an issue of unspoken expectations. The wife expected her husband to do it. And he expected her to do it. Not out of any kind of laziness or malice or anything unreasonable, it’s just what they both knew.
This is classic unspoken expectations.
So how do we translate that as we’re talking about friendships and friends that are for you? If you are a mom and you are drowning under a pile of children and you are trying to just get through every day with sippy cups and dishes and laundry and exhaustion and life and you have a friend who is placing unspoken expectations on you to call her or text her or to do something or be something in some way that you’re not, it is really hard for those friendships to grow and thrive. It’s hard because you actually don’t even know at times what she’s expecting. But you find out after the fact, maybe just by the way she’s treating you, that you didn’t do something she expected you to do.
When I look at the friendships in my life and the friends who are for me, they don’t place these kinds of unspoken expectations on me. They let me make my choices.
They know that if I don’t text them back, it isn’t because I don’t like them and it isn’t because I don’t wanna be friends and it isn’t because I’m a jerk, it’s simply because I am in a hard season of motherhood and I’m doing the best I can and I’m making so much choices every single day on how to spend my time and what to do and who to do it with and I’m doing it all the best I can.
I usually know and can tell when a friend is placing unspoken expectations on me because there’s a lot of proverbial huffing and puffing when I’m with them. I can tell that I am not being and I’m not doing enough and one of the hardest things about that, is that I already believe that about myself anyway. I’m not being and I’m not doing enough for my family either. Because that’s just how moms feel.
So when a friend lets me make my choices, when she wants me to be free to choose what I love to do and how I want to spend my time, I know she’s for me and I actually want to spend time with her. Because she then becomes part of what’s life-giving to me and I get to be that for her and we end up choosing time with each other over and over.
3. They feel joy for me when good things happen in my life.
I cannot overstate how important this is in friendship. The friends in my life who are for me want good things to happen to me. They cheer and their faces light up when I tell them something that’s awesome in my life that I just can’t believe is happening to me and they gasp on the other end of the phone when I’m calling to tell them, “GUESS WHAT? I STARTED A PODCAST!!” They show up with joy when joy has entered my life because they want to share in it with me. This one took a lot of years for me to work out because there will be so many times in your life as a mom, when one of your friends gets something that you don’t have and that you want. I would never sit here and tell you that is easy because it simply is not easy. But can I tell you that after over 30 years of adult friendships, that when I choose to be happy for my friends and the joy that enters their lives? It changes something in me and makes me better at doing that the next time easier.
When I choose to celebrate the goodness in my friends’ lives and come alongside them and cheer for them when awesome things happen to them, I grow and change and I become a better friend. This takes practice. And It takes intention. You will never just be this way. But you can learn. You can. Your friends can learn to do this, too. The people who do this in my life are some of the best people I know. I wanna be this kind of person. I want to be this kind of friend. And I want to HAVE these kinds of friends. When I can do this for my friend and she can do this for me, our friendship will absolutely thrive and grow, and we will want to get coffee and we will want to hang out and we won’t be placing unspoken expectations on each other’s shoulders because we will KNOW we are for one another, and it is simply the best thing in the world!
And that leads me to the last one. Friends who are for me?
4. They want all of my good relationships to flourish.
One of my very best friends, a looooong time friend is IN HER VERY BEING a MASTER CLASS at this. When we first moved here to the East Coast from the Midwest 13 years ago, I didn’t really have any friends here. My sister lived here which is why we were moving here and I absolutely love my sister, but she had her life and her friends and I really wanted to build my own life here. We started going to our church, which we still go to now and I met her one of the very first weeks that I was there. It’s kind of a funny story because she had actually been reading my blog when I lived out in Michigan, and it was just so fun meeting her and connecting with her in person here in Raleigh!
We hadn’t been friends for more than a few weeks when she reached out to her closest girlfriends and organized a play date at the park so that I could meet all of her friends and they could meet me. I remember being so floored by it, because it was so loving, and it was so kind, and I felt so seen and so understood and I just couldn’t believe that she would share all of her friends with me. I look back on that now and I still can’t believe it. It was just such a beautiful picture of someone being for me. To this day, she is one of my dearest friends, even though she doesn’t even live here anymore, and I am still best friends with one of the moms I met that day at the park.
When you have a friend who is for you, she will want people to love you. She just will. I’m not saying she’s gonna give you all of her friends, but I’m not saying she won’t either. She will want you to have other friends and she’ll want those friends to be good to you. She will want your marriage to thrive and she will love it when you are choosing to invest in your marriage and when you say no to girls night because it’s date night and she knows it is good for you to have a healthy and fun and great marriage. She will understand when you choose your kids over her and you say no to her party because your son has a baseball game and there is nowhere else you’d rather be than in those bleachers cheering for him!
When I am for my friends, I want their friendships to grow and be awesome and I want their marriages to be healthy and I give them the freedom to choose those relationships when they want or need to. I want them to spend time with their kids and their family and their other friends and I LOVE hearing about their very full lives when we get together. It makes me feel so honored to get to be one of the people they love! And when a friend does this for me? I cannot even tell you how much I love her for it.
So those are four ways to know someone is for you.
- I know where I stand with them
- They don’t place unreasonable, unspoken expectations on me.
- They feel joy for me when good things happen in my life.
- They want all of my good relationships to flourish.
So why is this, having friends who are for you, so important for young moms? Why is it for especially important for young moms? Because when you are in the throes of motherhood, so much of your life is not knowing where you stand with your kids. If they’re tiny, one minute they hate you and the next minute they’re crawling on top of you smothering you in kisses and hugs. It’s a yoyo world with them. They’re throwing a full cup on the floor and writhing around in defiance one minute and running into your arms the next.
And let me tell you, this continues all the way up through their teenage years. One minute you’re their hero and BEST MOM EVER. And literally, within the HOUR, you are Satan. “Why you so baited mom? or “I cannot wait to move out of this house!” But this is okay because they are kids. I am the adult they are the children. And I know where they stand with me. I have loved them since the moment I first set eyes on them. If they aren’t sure how they feel about me at any given time, it’s ok. I know how I feel about them.
So when life is like this, you’re raising little kids and life is Crazytown, you want to know who your true friends are and that they’re for you because those are the people you want and need in your life.
You can be friends with a lot of people. But with friends who are for you, you can expose your heart, let your guard down, and not wonder if your vulnerability will be weaponized in some way against you. You can be free to choose how you spend your time and make your own choices and it’s so freeing and so good and these friendships rise to the top as the ones you want to invest in.
It is interesting to me now that I have older kids because my teenagers can actually sniff this out like nothing else. We talk about it alot around here, what it means when someone is for you, and they get it. I ask my kids about their friends regularly and somewhere in our conversations, I always end up asking the question, “So Is he for you? Is she for you?” Sometimes they say “Yes, I think so.” And there are times when they will say “No”. And other times they will say “I wish he was”.
I get this. OH, do I get this.
Because moms, just like teenagers, a lot of us are more tied up in trying to be liked by the people we want to be liked by than being friends with the people who are truly for us and good for us. In high school, it’s the popular kids, and in college is the sororities and fraternities and as moms? It’s the cool mom group we just can’t get into. But in striving after those friendships, we might miss the people right in front of us who really do love us and want to spend time with us and are for us!
I wanna say this as we start to wrap up here. When I look back on my thirty years of adult friendships, there are people I have not done this well with. There are people in my life that I love, but when I look back on all of our relating, I can’t tell you that I was for them. And when I’ve not done friendship well, it really has been one of these four things that’s gotten in the way. There’s been something lodged in my own heart that’s needed unlodging. I’m envious or hurt or in a crappy season and just struggling in some way to be a good friend.
So if you are in this place of wondering why some friendships in your life are feeling so hard and others feel so life-giving to you and you can’t figure out why it feels like that, I would love to challenge you to go through these four things and see if it gives you some clarity. And ask yourself the hard questions too.
Are you being someone who is a friend who is for your friends?
Do you see breakdowns in your own life in these areas and how can you improve and be a better friend?
I am always walking myself through these things because when my friends think of me, I want them to say, “Yes! Without a single doubt. Sarah Short is for me.”
So I challenge you to take inventory. Look at your friendships and look at your heart. It’s hard, but it is so worth the work it takes to find friends that are for you, and to be a mom that loves her friends well and is for them!
Those are four ways to know someone is truly for you. Learn how to identify the characteristics of a healthy friendship that stands out and makes you feel loved, and how you can be the kind of friend that cheers for and supports the other moms in your life!