Friends

One of the things my parents always told me but I had to learn on my own anyway is that you can't go through life writing people off because of one or two disagreeable things. When I was younger, I used to hold grudges, I used to obsess over some small aspect of a person's personality, and I used to throw them in the discard pile. My parents have a lot of friends, and I remember on occasion wondering how they could be friends with some of them when it seemed that they didn't share their core values. Years later, I have come to realize that a lot of things I considered core values were just different opinions about stuff that didn't really matter much. I'm not saying you should hang out with racists or murderers, but no one in the world is going to think and act exactly like you. So you bond and laugh at the things you agree on, and you discuss or overlook the things you don't, because life is too short. You can roll your eyes at some of the things they do, you can laugh at them behind their back once in awhile, but
you can remain friends. The thing I learned is that a lot of my parent's friends that I would have written off years ago are some of the closest friends they have now, and have been there through thick and thin. You get out of friendships what you put into them, and some of the people you toss away so casually might turn out to be there for you when no one else is.