You Friend's Friends Friendship with your Friends

We all have friends and everyone gets together and talks.  A lot of everyone's talking is about what they have done, will do and is doing, but part of what people talk about is their other friends and relatives and mostly it is to complain about them.  There are real dangers about this last practice.

The first thing about using one group of friends to complain about another group of friends is that usually that group will hear a lot about your other friends and only the stuff that bugs you.  Your friends never hear about the awesome time that you had with them or the time that you were in trouble and they dropped everything to help you out.  They just hear about how bat-shit crazy they are.  Over time your friends get a negative impression of your other set of awesome friends and they make assumptions of them and without realizing it they will, if they meet them, they will be distant towards them and they will see it.

The other trouble is that when you complain, often you may gloss over the cause and effect relationships that occurred for your other friends to give you a little grief.  When people talk about their other friends negatively, it is only just one version of the events, you don't get to hear their side too.  

I got to get to know one of my friend's friends recently and they asked my friend why I was so distant from them.  That is when it clicked in my head.  It was a little funny that my friend did not see why I was distant from her friend.  All the negative things that she told me made me feel that I had to be extra nice and good otherwise her friend would treat my friend badly; this was not how most of my friend's experience with her friend ever went and there was a disconnect.   We were talking with another friend about his friend.  When we got together he only talked about bad stuff about this guy, but in the meantime another friend of mine became friends with the same guy and they talked about this guy with praise and nothing negative, so that when my other friend commented to my friend that he needs to get away from this guy, I knew the other side.  It was then that I explained what had happened.

It is important to realize that one of the most important things that friends do is provide a safe time for you and them to complain about other friends and people in their life, but it is equally important to realize that if their other friends were really that bad all the time they would not be friends too.  Do you understand?  When you hear your friends talking about their friends, understand and keep this entry in your head your friends friends might just be good people for you to know because after all you do have at least one thing in common, who you are friends with.