All we need is love, we sing about it, write about it, make plays and TV about love. And all we need is love. Some of us, all of us hungry for love and friendship. We learn how to be friends and be able to love.

And we learn to trust our friends, and we learn to trust our lovers. We need to know we are secure in our friendships and love, or our world will surely be turned upside down and inside out. We get damaged as we learn our friendships in life.

We learn to have expectations, we learn from family the nature of how to be friends and how to be a friend. And we all learn to the pattern our teachers show us. Some teachers are good and others nearly, some are so bad they make us awful at friendship and being a friend. We only learn through our experience what sort of friendships we have and the friend we are.

Life teaches us to be the type of friend we have learned. Close friend, best friend and far distant friend, those we see and hear little of. We learn our friendship from connection.

As we learn the codes of friendship, we learn integrity and values associated with our friendly connections. Or we don’t learn.

And we can make assumptions about friendship based on our code and values. We expect friends to be like us. And we rarely check out our friends unless life has taught us. We might have best friends better described as enemies, if we look closer, for their codes and values are quite different.

Friends can treat us one way and we don’t realise until the chips are down that our enemies are with us. Our enemy, our worst nightmare. For when we treat friends with love we don’t see all of them. Our friendly behaviour is based on false and incomplete codes and values. We feel lost and behave contrary to our code and values and behaviour without knowing, until its that friendship moment where we find no reliance and no support. And we feel the rush of foolishness and inappropriate connection. Our behaviour wrong and our confusion wrapped in betrayal.

And we kid ourselves with our codes and values and we realise we have behaved badly for in false friendship, behaviour can be repulsive for the doer and receiver because the codes are misunderstood. And we the betrayed feel the guilt and shame, our friendship exposed as a sham and lost to our inner world of calm, peace and love.

Our betrayal of values and codes . Its as bad as our inappropriate behaviour under the guise of friendship. We realise our mistake and we need regroup our outlook and stay away from blame. We need to reappraise our outlook.

When we see betrayal so, its easy to let our mind become poisoned to others we let into our friendship, for we lose trust in our own behaviour with everything. Don’t. For its easier on ourselves and those who betray to revisit our core code and values. Realise our mistake, feel the burn of getting it wrong and move on to forgive. Forgive ourselves for not getting our friendship right from the get go. We will be better at understanding our friendships when we understand our codes and values are not universal and we see that some friends will never get our understanding or our need to cherish friendship.

Friendships and love, so complex it’s a wonder we get any of them right if we cannot keep our confidence and outlook. We need establish some simple rules.

My father taught me three simple measures. Cherish, superficiality and indifference. When we see how we measure with these principles, how we cherish and are cherished, how we are superficial, how we are indifferent and how superficial and indifferent to us others can be, we find it easier to understand our friendships.

We cannot let everyone into our world with the same amount of friendship, or expect others either to have infinite capacities. But we can check out where we stand in all friendships, our code, our able ness and especially the other way round.

It takes two to make friendship work. It takes two to establish codes. It take just us to measure our able ness and theirs and willingness to be a friend. It takes some simple and easy steps to redemption and reasserting our codes and values. We get it wrong and so do others.

We need be human and feel the pain of misunderstanding and our dislike of our own behaviour and others when things breakdown. We can feel our foolishness and wish for it never to have happened. And we can forgive our intent and behaviour as we learn to be a better friend and keep close to real friendship as we go.

Hard lessons, that those who would be our friends are not always equipped to understand. And when we have something to offer friendships get messy for others motives are as long as life and short on love.

We might understand our friendship our codes and values better, and be a little cautious. And don’t forget that others codes and values are the same. We need to be mindful how easy it is to assume we are all playing by the same rules. Or rules are open to interpret and ambition and needy and vulnerable people will overstep and bring out hollow outcomes.

Hollow friendships, as easy to acquire as dirt on our shoes. Just brush our dust away and polish our outlook. Make good our contract with ourselves, put our best foot forward and get on with life. A brush with false friends is merely a scuff, still it cuts us deep in our esteem and our love. We learn we become wiser, and others may do the same.

Shame it is lost in that friendship, gone to dust and lost in no trust. Return to our codes and values, keep with the experience of life, forgive as best we can and move on. Some things get broke and we won’t fix them, some things “aint” broke and we break them. Be a wiser person for our experience teaches.

Some friendships we will squander and some friendships we will cherish, sometimes we will be as guilty as others in our friendships as we learn their true values as we experience. Our shame is only complete when we don’t learn and make good our behaviour to our codes and values of friendship.

And if you read what I write, and as I write what you read, be aware how often we assume friendship, where none is really there. We forget our codes and values, we forget them as if they are always there and everyone has codes and values which are the same as you and me. We need check out our codes and values, we need check out friendship and make clear to ourselves firstly, before we lead others to false and mistaken connections.

The right and the wrong? There is none as we go, for we will be firm friends for lifetimes and firmly false friends in moments when we forget to check out our codes and our values and delude without malice or prejudice many we encounter in this life.

Best not forget our behaviour, in one situation is fine, and in others we might cringe and recoil as memory serves our contrition. No one is ever innocent as we deliver our false friendships as happily and mistakenly, we might spend time in reflection and cause less havoc for all concerned.

Be mindful to cherish and be mindful as we behave, our experience teaches us the difference. When we are indifferent and superficial, we will get it back in all respects, until we are mindful, we then cherish and show our friends, friendly respect.