Family and friends are just so important, aren’t they?  They represent blood and water: two independently life-giving properties that together, can enrich our lives in ways that nothing else can.  Not all of our relationships add value, however.  That’s why it’s just as well we women can discern the quality of the relationships those who come into our lives bring with them.  

Need proof of your discernment skills or want some positive reinforcement?  Take this quick quiz.

THE RELATIONSHIP QUALITY DISCERNMENT QUIZ

INSTRUCTIONS

Organise paper and pen.  
Answer all questions to the best of your ability.  
For each question, write a minimum of one name and a maximum of six only.
For any question that is not applicable for you, write ‘NA’.
All answers are valid and none is right or wrong.

QUESTIONS

Identify any person or people in the whole world you consider your:

Best Friend(s).  List name(s).
Good Friend(s).  List name(s).
Acquaintance(s).  List name(s).
Troublemaker(s).  List name(s).
Worst Enemy(ies). List name(s).   

Time to explore our answers.  Take at look at your piece of paper.  What you’ll notice right away is whether you have all girls’ names or all boys’ names, or a combination of both.  

Remember how quickly you were able to put this all together, too – proof that you possess and were able to apply your discernment skills with relative ease.

Now we’ve ticked the gender box and confirmed out capacity for discernment, let’s look a little deeper.  Are you surprised by any name you have allocated a particular relationship quality to or does it all look as you would expect?   Now here’s the big question….

Where is your name?  Ideally, it will be on the Best Friend list.  And why shouldn’t it be?  After all, we’ve all been our own worst enemy.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons we women can be so discerning: we don’t need Troublemakers and Worst Enemies in our lives when we do their work for them.  

Let me share my story with you. My husband and I lived a long way from where we worked and each day we would commute for hours in our separate cars.  The unspoken rule was that “first home makes dinner”.  One evening I managed to put together what I thought was a great meal with little time to spare before he walked in the door.  We sat down and I waited in anticipation for at least one compliment.  He made just one comment.

He said that he didn’t like the texture of the chicken.

Well, if he thought that was bad he was even less enamoured at the cold shoulder that followed immediately thereafter!

I took it personally.  And here’s the rub.  We women are just too quick to take responsibility.  In this instance, I was taking responsibility for the texture of the chicken.  When whose responsibility was it really?  The chicken’s, of course.  
But I didn’t let that stop me.  The remainder of the evening was a disaster.  How different it would have been if I had just agreed that the chicken probably didn’t meet its tenderness KPI (key performance indicators).  

He was talking about the chicken.  I made it all about me – and him.  And it wasn’t the first time in my life my misplaced sense of responsibility had resulted in my being at the very least a troublemaker to myself.

Times change as have I.  Every day I strive to be my own Best Friend.  It’s a conscious decision I have taken to live a gold star life.  My now, ex-husband made a similarly conscious decision and ironically, we are now Good Friends.

Being your own Best Friend isn’t synonymous with divorce.  It is synonymous with being true to oneself.  And that has a positive ripple effect on every other relationship.

The quality of our lives is evidence of the quality of the friendship we each have with ourselves; Best Friend, Good Friend, Acquaintance, Troublemaker or Own Worst Enemy.  Imagine how different our lives would become if we took our own Best Friend with us everywhere we go.  We’d benefit from the friendship of a lifetime.  For a lifetime.

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