With love and prayers by F. Jarvis. Quotes XVII

-At the heart of every successful and enduring marriage is friendship.
-It takes two people to make a friendship.
-Vulnerability is the indispensable foundation and basis, the sine qua non, of friendship. No vulnerability, no friendship,
-Three qualities you can bring to a relationship that will help you make and keep a friend:
1. Hopeful commitment.
2.Openness.
3. Loyalty.
-There is no marriage, there is no friendship, in which there are not bad times. For worse is for real.
-We have made a hopeful commitment to care about another person at some cost to ourselves.
-Openness to differences in the first instance. Some people want their friends to look like them, dress like them, act like them, and share the very same interests. Such people are essentially narcissistic.
-One of the greatest joys of real friendship is to come to appreciate differences in others.
-Be open to differences. Be open also to change. All real friendships change and grow.
-Friendship must be based not on controlling but on caring.
-Loyalty: genuine and abiding concern for a person through thick and thin.
-Being loyal to another person does not mean we have to agree with him. Quite the contrary. Loyalty usually requires us to express our disagreement. But loyalty also requires that we express our disagreement to his face, not behind his back, and often privately.
-Friendship is defined by who you handle the disagreements that inevitably arise.
-When the chips are down, when things are for worse rather than for better, when things are poorer than for richer, we discover who our friends really are. Fair weather friends are not friends at all. Real friends are loyal even when it's costly to be loyal.
-As we begin this new year together, my prayer for you is that you will find the courage to risk making friends, and that, through commitment, openness and loyalty, above all, loyalty, you will experience the joy that comes from making and keeping friends.