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A Guide to Long-term Friendships: An Investment Well Worth Making

With the many pressures in our busy lives, it's often hard to keep track of our own responsibilities let along find the time to invest in long-term relationships.  This hour, we look at what it takes to keep a friendship going for a life-time.   Interpersonal communications expert Lori Johnson of the University of Northern Iowa tells us that "it's never too late to find a good friend."

Many of our IPR listeners shared the stories of their friendships during the program, and we also heard from former Talk of Iowa guests Jill Schwalbe Means and Jamie Greenland Gory, the "Two Chicks from the Sticks," still very much life-long friends.  Johnson, an adjunct professor of Communication Studies, offered some great insights based on her long career of teaching and conducting communication training workshops.  She told Charity: "Long-term friendships are truly a gift--we tend to invest a lot more of our energy and efforts into maintaining romantic and family relationships and often expect our regular friendships will take care of themselves."

However, she says it's easy to neglect friendships and this leads to them fading away or fizzling out.   She told us "long-term friendships take a lot of effort, time and investment of energy from both friends."  So what's involved in this?  She says: supportiveness (being there when they need you), being open and disclosing your feelings and and showing an overall positivity.   Women's friendships, Johnson told the IPR audience, are often completely based on talk, whereas with men, it's more often based on sharing activities.  In fact, an activity may be primary in bringing two men together.   Johnson says men can go years without having much of an actual conversation and still stay deeply connected.  The implied feeling of men, she says, is "We're still friends unless you tell me we're not."

Charity Nebbe is the host of IPR's Talk of Iowa