Book Review: Friendships Don't Just Happen

Over the past three years, I've come to the conclusion that I take for granted a lot of my life-long friendships.

I've made this statement several times before on this blog, but it is something that I have to remind myself of, otherwise I fear I will forget it.  The other thing I have to remember is that these people, who I now cherish and turn to without so much as a blink of an eye, were once strangers to me at one time, as well, which is another reason why I believe I mention it so often.  However, today I mention this fact for a different reason.  Today I want to talk about a special book called Friendships Don't Just Happen by Shasta Nelson.

If I had to guess, I will always look back upon my life-long friendships with such fondness, not only because I have a really awesome group of individuals I can call friends, but also because of how easy it was for me to make friends "back then".  Take how I met my best friend...  On the second or third day of day camp when we were about 10 years old, I asked this girl with curly, blonde hair what it was like to have braces on.  Ever since then, we've been a part of the others life - in some way, shape or form.  As an adult, opportunities like those just don't present themselves as often as they do when we are younger.

So what is someone to do if, as an adult, they want to make new friends?  Making friends as an adult isn't easy, but I feel like understanding them is just as difficult.  As kids, I suspect, we don't take the time to truly understand what friendship and how friendships form because we are simply not mature enough question it.  However, as adults with many life changes, we find ourselves in more and more situations where we begin to question why it was so "easy" to form friendships when we were younger.

This is where I direct your attention to Friendships Don't Just Happen. One of the things I like most about this book is the way it's structured.  Broken into three sections, Shasta first talks to readers about friends, frientimacy and why it's an important part of life.  Then the second section looks at how we turn friendly people we meet into friends.  Then, last, but surely not least, she focuses how being intentional about continuing friendships plays a role, too. 

I happen to be familiar with Shasta Nelson's work through her website www.GirlFriendCircles.com.  Over the past several months, I've read and watched videos created by Shasta and I have say she has such a wonderful caring tone to these works.  So, it doesn't come as much of a surprise to me that this tone was carried through to her book as well. 

Though geared towards women, I feel that Friendships Don't Just Happen talks about a lot of universal themes that can also be applied to men, as well.

Thanks to Shasta for the book in exchange for an honest review.