Your Friend Picker–Three Lessons That Fine Tuned Mine
“How do you pick your friends?”
What an awesome question I was thrilled to get recently from a certain young person in my life.
Let’s talk “The Picker.”
The one that selects the friends you choose to have in your life.
My own Picker has been shaped and modified for the better by three wonderful friends over the years.
Thank you, Gina, for explaining it all boils down to fruit.
“Picking good friends is like walking through the produce aisles at the grocery store,” she told me. “There’s plenty that looks good at first glance, but you have to pick up each piece. Does it feel right? Smell good? Seem like it is a good thing to put in your body? Will they nourish you? Or bring you pain? There will be some friends that seem like a good choice at first, but upon closer inspection, you find they should be put back on the shelf and left behind.”
Thank you, Tricia, for teaching me that those good friends are the baseline for picking a good man.
The oh-so-wise, Tricia, on the far left, along with the equally wonderful friend and teacher, Lori, in the middle.
“What kind of girlfriends do you have?” she once asked me.
“The best!” I declared, thinking the sweetest cherries and berries. Not a mushy apple in the bunch.
“Perfect. Now you should expect the same standards in a romantic relationship that you get from your girlfriends,” she spelled out.
This might sound like Obvious 101 to you, Dear Reader.
Me?
It was a big clonk over the head.
One that I wasn’t ready to hear until my 40’s.
I looked at the magnificent group of women friends who surrounded me and enriched my life. Then I looked at the stupidly long list of junk I’d accepted from various men over the years. Things I wouldn’t have stuck around for with a female friend.
Not
A
Chance.
That rotten fruit would’ve been back on the shelf faster than you could say, “Squished banana.”
That one nugget changed my focus on the kind of man I was looking for.
Don’t give me too much credit.
It took Sandra to put on the final polish.
Been amazingly lucky to be friends with the wonderful SanDra since we were freshman roommates at Stanford.
“You want to pick a ‘Hand Over Heart,’ kind of guy,” she counseled me after a big break up she was not-so-secretly happy to see come to pass.
“Hand over heart?”
“Yes,” she said. “The kind man who would lay down his life for you, who is such a good solid person that you find yourself actually putting your hand over your heart when you describe him.”
You can bet that Gina, Tricia, and Sandra were all there a couple of years ago when I married my Mr. SummerFest.
I caught a glimpse of Sandra as I walked down the aisle.
Yep, she had her hand over her heart.
“Good pickin’, my friend,” she said.
Talk about the ultimate fruit salad kind of day.
SanDra toasting us at our wedding. The “Dra” Seal of Approval–sought by brides the world over for their selection of groom. Granted to only a special few.
So there you have it, Young Friend.
That’s how I pick.
How about you, Reader Friend?
Find more uplifting stories on my website, DarynKagan.com
Please catch my newspaper column each week in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Dayton Daily News and other newspapers across Ohio.
9:18 am
Hi Daryn,
I love your fruit picking analogy.
My own fruit/friendship analogy is like this:
I see my friendships as fruit growing on a giant tree. When the fruit is tiny and green, it is not so clear how it will ultimately turn out.
But after time passes, and the tree is exposed to thunder storms, and drought, and abuse from violent winds, much of the fruit has been shaken off the tree. It lies, squished and decaying on the ground, soon to disappear completely.
It is the succulent healthy fruit that withstands all tests of time and turbulence that is worth the keeping.
And I am lucky enough to have a small basket full of the most nutrient rich fruit imaginable.
I thank God for my amazing friend every day 🙂
Hazel Hunt
12:03 pm
Hazel–You sound like an amazing and wise friend, yourself!