Book Review: How to be A Best Friend Forever

BIOGRAPHICAL ENTRY

Townsend, John Dr., How to be A Best Friend Forever, Brentwood, TN: Worthy Publishing, 2011, 176 pp.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AUTHOR

Dr. John Townsend is a psychologist, speaker and leadership coach. He has authored or coauthored more than 25 books that have sold 5 million copies, including the 2 million-unit bestseller Boundaries, Leadership Beyond Reason, and Handling Difficult People. He cohosts the nationally syndicated daily radio program NewsLifeLive, heard on 180 markets nationwide, with a listening audience of 3 million. Dr. Townsend and his family live in Southern California.

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: A best friend forever (BFF) is a person that shares life with you on a consistent basis throughout life. The genesis of forming best friends begins in the family where trust is learned. As we mature we form relationships with friends outside the family. A BFF is a person that you value because you depend on one another in all life situations, both good ones and bad ones.

CHAPTER 1, Fs, BFs, and BFFs: Friend add something to your life: trust, companionship, and shared experiences. Friendships require three elements. Knowing objective information and shared experiences. Liking is when you want to spend time with each other. Presence is spend time together. This is essential. Best friends are open-ended and depending on circumstances, and they have a higher priority than friends. Best friends forever are friends with no end in sight to the relationship. A best friend forever can be a male or female, but requires caution. Evaluate the situation.

CHAPTER 2, The Accidental Necessity: Most friendships begin accidentally or when we meet someone we like. It takes both quantity of time and quality of time to improve friendship relationships. A best friend in most cases should not be limited to one’s spouse. Having best friends can improve the marriage relationship because each partner has needs that their spouse cannot meet. Best friends can give us insight that helps our marriage relationship. A best friend is characterized by trust and vulnerability; an ability to open up to tell the truth about ourselves and to hear the truth about ourselves.

CHAPTER 3, Life Is better When We are Hanging Out Together: Best friends make the “no purpose phone calls” just to ask how the other person is doing. The author states that our attachment to another person is based on liking the person and our connection to the other person. We can come to like a person as we share time together and get to know each other in ways that lead to understanding and shared needs. Liking someone initially does not necessarily mean that the other person will make a best friend.

CHAPTER 4, The Time Investment: Quantity of time and quality of time requires frequency of time put into a beginning relationship if it is to become a best friend relationship. Both parties need to invest in the effort to see each other regularly. Best friends spend enough time together to get caught up on what is taking place in their lives. They connect regularly, and they are able to share truth with each other.

CHAPTER 5, BFs in a Facebook World: Social media has the potential to be both good and bad for a best friend relationship. It allows for fast connection and exchange of information. On the other hand it may lead to less time spent together; exchanging face to face contact and sharing of feelings and ideas. Social media can lead to exchange of information without taking the time to reflect on the issues.

CHAPTER 6, Speed Dial: When a significant event takes place in our lives we should think of our best friends first. We need validation and best friends can give us the honest validation that we need. When we have reason to celebrate, have a crisis, and have a complaint we should contact our best friend as soon as possible. Mutual support in significant life situations builds our relationships.

CHAPTER 7, What Matters Most: In order to develop BFs relationships we must learn to let go of the past instead of seeking revenge. We must adopt core values that form the foundations of what we believe. We must have context values that tell us how we will conduct specific areas in our life. We may be able to find warmth, acceptance instead of judgment and condemnation from people that do not share the Christian faith.

CHAPTER 8, Permission to Speak the Truth: Speaking the truth from the heart increases growth. Honesty is a core value and a habit. Dishonesty deteriorates a relationship. Townsend names two types of truth. Being truthful about yourself helps others to trust you. Being truthful about the other person helps us to speak truth with grace. Grace helps us to confront others the right way.

CHAPTER 9, No Explanation Needed: All of us have a dark side that include past mistakes, a habit you can’t break and you are ashamed of. There is a judge within us, but we need full acceptance of ourselves and from others. Best friends accept the mistakes that are really ours and love us through them.

CHAPTER 10, Family, Friends, and Family Friends: Our families teach us about relationships that we form with other people. Our BFs should not be limited to family only. We grow when we expand our relationships to other people. The family may reject an individual, and the individual may reject the family.

CONCLUSION, The Power of BFs: Best friends have power in our lives. This power may be positive or negative. The power results because we care about what our best friends think and how they respond to us in a given situation.

STUDY GUIDE: The author gives us scenarios that challenge the reader to reflect on our relationships with our BFs. The reader is asked questions that help to reflect and evaluate his relationship with a BF. He gives activities that will help us to go deeper into our relations.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

In this book Dr. Townsend helps us to see our need to develop BF relationships based on the concepts of knowing, liking, and presence. I found this book challenging me as to whether or not I have a BF. Until now, I have considered my best friends to be persons that I trust to do what I believe is the right thing to do. However, there is so much about me that these people do not know, and I know a lot less about them that I had ever thought about.

I believe that my brothers were BFs, and a Nursing schoolmate of mine was a best friend. Unfortunately all of these are deceased, and I admit that neither of these has been replaced. After discussing this book with my daughter, she has helped me to see that it is not necessary to have a BF that can meet all the needs in our lives. Different BFs may meet different needs. What is really important is that we make contact with our BFs just to check in and keep in touch with each other.

At the end of the book in the Study Guide it became clear to me that the author knows that it is unlikely that the reader has done all the things that he suggest in this book. The benefit of this book is that it provides the reader with guidelines for developing BFs relationships.

Life is a journey and we encounter various situations on our journey. We find ourselves in various circumstances. Are we honest about our core values and our context values? How will these values help us to evaluate ourselves and others so that we can form new best friends?