My #1 Tip for Amazing Sister-Friendships

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time in community with Black women in what can only be described as cultivating and nurturing friendships.  I’ve gathered with girlfriends, old and new, for the sole purpose of communing based on our commonalities and agreeing to grow through our differences. I’ve danced the night away in celebration on birthdays and nuptials. I’ve stiffened my neck to talk through things on the phone call that my girlfriends…or I…really needed to talk through. And truthfully, I consider myself lucky to have women in my life with whom I share the bond of sisterhood. As they say, if you have one true friend, you have more than your fair share. It got me thinking about how I came to be so lucky. How did I end up with such amazing friendships with women?

It’s not easy.  As a child, I often heard women say, “I can’t be friends with women because…”.  It made me wonder if had the capacity to see beyond the cattiness and ‘man-stealing’ that I often witnessed on television and in my community.  At the same time, I wondered:

“How can women not find commonality with other when, by definition, the have so much in common”?

But what I now understand is that sometimes it’s not that we can’t find commonality with other women. It’s that friendship isn’t born out of commonality alone. Friendships grow out of a shared desire to be friends and a commitment to remain friends. In other words, be a friend to have a friend.  But we’re not talking about any old run of the mill friendship here.  We’re talking about amazing, life-changing, ever-evolving sister-friendships.  We’re talking about the kind of friendship that you can depend on whether to storms, celebrate the triumphs and stand the tests of time.  So, my #1 tip to have amazing sister-friendship you desire is to demonstrate being the kind of sister-friend you desire. That’s it.  Easy, right?

Wrong! Embodying the type friendship you want with the women in your life is easier said than done. Personally, I fall short of this standard quite often. In fact, my friends will tell you about me is that I don’t call enough. I can be selfish. I can be mean. But what they will also you, almost without fail is that I show up, I offer my best self (whatever that means at any given moment), and I remain committed to nurturing healthy friendships.  These things are important to me so I try my best to demonstrate them.  And somehow, I am granted these same virtues when I need them.

So, I encourage you to spend some time thinking of the exact kind of sister-friendship you want and need seek to embody that within yourself. After all, we attract what we already are.