Writers 
True friendship is the strongest relationship of all, and is the fundamental ingredient of every truly successful marriage.
Friendship does not come to full bloom overnight; it takes time to grow and mature. Since husbands and wives should enter marriage as best friends, it is important that they develop their friendship beforehand. Building this friendship is the greatest value and, indeed, the primary purpose of dating.
The strongest and most successful long-term relationships are those that are based on friendship rather than on any sense of need or incompleteness on the part of either or both persons involved. A relationship motivated by need destroys friendship because it is essentially self-centered. A person in need will enter a relationship seeking primarily to satisfy that need rather than seeking to satisfy the needs of the other person or help build that person’s character.
Entering a relationship primarily for what we can get out of it defrauds the other person, and that is sin.
One problem I have noticed through years of experience in advising and from my own life is that most people do not understand how to build and maintain wholesome friendships. We don’t know how to make friends or how to be a friend. While this is a serious problem among believers, it is even worse in the non-believing world.
Friendship in the world is based inevitably on manipulation.
Consciously or not, people in the world use friendships as convenient and expedient opportunities to advance themselves.
What the world calls friendship is not true friendship, because true friendship is based on love, which comes from God. People who are without God do not truly understand love and therefore cannot truly understand friendship.
When we became believers and were born again by the Spirit of God, our spirits were made new, but not our minds or our bodies.
Those we must renew through knowledge and growth. The challenge we face is learning how to handle ourselves with a new spirit dwelling in an “old” mind and body that don’t know how to behave. We have to learn how to live and act as children of God.
This is probably nowhere harder to do than in relationships, particularly between males and females. Our newborn spirits tell us one thing while our unrenewed minds and bodies tell us something else. Without a disciplined spirit, the chemical and sexual stirrings of mind and body are a serious problem among believers, it is even worse in the non-believing world.
Friendship in the world is based inevitably on manipulation.
Consciously or not, people in the world use friendships as convenient and expedient opportunities to advance themselves.
What the world calls friendship is not true friendship, because true friendship is based on love, which comes from God.
QUESTIONS FOR BUILDING FRIENDSHIPS
Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to meet someone but didn’t know what to say or how to break the ice? That is a very common experience for most people. Few of us are taught while growing up how to speak to new people. On the contrary, we are cautioned not to talk to strangers. It is easy to forget that every friend or acquaintance of ours was a stranger once.
The key to overcoming this deficiency is to learn to focus on the other person rather than on ourselves and our fear or shyness.
