Friendship Flow is an organisation developed for the sole purpose of fostering, building and maintaining friendship. Friendship Flow recognises that in this world of social media, people have resorted to making friends on line, forgetting the impact and importance of real life friendship. There are different beneficial advantages to having real life friends; but the most important I want to focus
on is its ability to prevent loneliness and isolation. Loneliness is painful, especially when a person has been living with loneliness for a prolonged period of time. Therefore, it is advisable and good to invest time, energy and attention into finding and cultivating a close circuit of friends. However, it is not that some do not want to make friends but they lack the ability and/or skill. And this is where Friendship Flow comes in; to help you develop this skill by teaching you on a step by step basis. Although online friends are good, however they are qualitatively different to real life friends. Online friends are good if you are house bound; but online friends can also contribute or make you miserable especially if you allow yourself to get caught up in the “Friendship Paradox” where you start obsessing about the number of friends you have, compared to person A or B. This might inadvertently start to affect your life, even dominate it negatively and if care is not taken it can lead to depression instead of your friends uplifting your spirit. According to psychologists, friendship is vital to life either as a baby, child or adult. Through childhood friendship, you learn the skills of sharing, conflict resolution as well as interpersonal skills among others. These are also the skills you take into adulthood that will shape and mould how you relate to others. In life, it is normal to do things that you enjoy and interests you. This principle also applies to how you choose your friends. People tend to choose friends that are similar to them, but at Friendship Flow, we will be exploring the idea of opposites attracts – just like in love. In life, I have realised that friendships that last longer than a hobby should not be based on immediate interest only. This is because when that hobby stops to interest, so would the friend.