“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.
“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 40s.
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.
“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.
So there you have it, Young Friend.
That’s how I pick.
How about you, Reader Friend?
Send me your picks at Daryn@DarynKagan.com.
