JORGE RODRIGUES SIMAO

There aren't many things on this planet that are more precious that true friends. It was the Greek writer Euripides who said, "One loyal friend is worth 10,000 relatives." Fortunately, we get to choose our friends as opposed to relatives, who are forced upon us. When choosing new friends, however, much care should be taken. The key to optimizing happiness is to cultivate quality friendships with a few happy and interesting individuals. Quality is more important than quantity. In this regard, we can rephrase the above words of Euripides to "One true friend is worth more than 10,000 superficial ones."

As in many areas of life, less can be more in the friendship game.

Although it's nice to have a lot of friends, too many will complicate your life.

Succumbing to the temptation to have as many friends as possible will hinder your overall happiness, since it depletes your time, energy, money, and creativity - resources that can be better utilized in getting whatever else you want out of life.

What's more, it's unlikely that you will develop many real friends if you spread yourself too thin among too many individuals.

Being popular - if that is what you desire - will not contribute much too how many true friends you acquire in your lifetime.

In the truest sense, friendship is based on relationships that are held together by trust, respect, and mutual admiration.

If you feel the need to be one of the girls or boys just to be popular, it is best that you head back to junior high and play the superficial games that teenyboppers play.

Clearly, you need to be more developed and mature to play the adult friendship game.

Never feel bad about being unpopular with many people.

This doesn't mean that you can't have friends.

Socrates was unpopular.

Freud was unpopular.

Jesus was unpopular.

Get the point? The point is that all of them still had friends.

It's just as important to put popularity in its proper place when you are looking for a friend.

The fact that a person is popular doesn't mean that he or she will make a great friend.

"A friend to all," warmed Aristotle, "is a friend to none."

Some individuals are not popular because they are different and don't fit in with the "me-too" crowd, whose members tend to imitate each other and aren't quite sure whom exactly they are trying to imitate.

Fact is, many genuine - but different - people are unpopular because peculiarity breeds contempt in our society.

Yet it has been my experience that some of these unpopular people can make great friends.

I would rather hang around genuine, different individuals who offend a lot of people than trendy me-too people who all talk and look alike and don't seem to offend anyone but me.

My contention is that it is better to wind up with three or four true and genuine friends than twenty-five pseudo-friends who will not go out of their way to make time for you or will not help make you a better person.

All things considered, true friends add to your happiness and seldom, if ever, subtract from it.

As Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker concluded, "No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended."

Try surrounding yourself with people who radiate warmth, kindness, and a fresh perspective on life in general.

You are likely to wind up with at least one true friend.

In my view, a true friend is also someone with whom you can do something boring - and still enjoy it.

Most important, a true friend should remind you of the person you would like to be.

Perhaps you haven't found "the real thing" in the way of friends.

Thus the words of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'The only way to have a friend, is to be one."

This brings up an important question: lust what kind of friend are you?

Generate a list of the important qualities you would like in a friend.

These are the same ones that you should develop and maintain if you want to attract quality friends into your life. In short, do the things that will make you the sort of person you yourself would really want to hang out with.