What makes a great friend? 9 things that my best friend Matthias does

I have a great friend by the name of Matthias. Recently, I went on a short hiking trip with him up a mountain to a cabin where we stayed together overnight. The next morning, as I packed my rucksack to wander back down through the forest on a narrow path as rays of sun were peeking through the leaves, I pondered this question – what makes a great friend? What makes Matthias such a great friend in my mind? As I broke down my general feelings of warmth and gratitude for having him in my life, these are the 9 points that I came up with:

He respects and observes my boundaries

In relationships generally, I regularly struggle to maintain and set boundaries, particularly when it comes to taking space and time for myself to figure something out. When this happens I often agree to do things that after some time, I realize, don’t fully resonate with me anymore. On many occasions, I would still do the thing I agreed to, sometimes out of fear that if I canceled plans or rescheduled, then the other person would be so upset that I’d be left alone and stranded.

With Matthias, I’ve had a chance to practice and observe firsthand that that’s not always the case with people. I’ve dared on a number of occasions to let him know that I don’t quite feel like meeting up anymore that evening or that on another thing something changed for me and I couldn’t commit anymore. He’s received me with warm understanding, spaciousness and most importantly flexibility to come up with new plans and schedules that would fit my current state of mind better and also acknowledge his wishes and ideas. This has been a fairly new experience for me compared to others from the past.

I’m most grateful for this practice with him and how it has taught me that taking care of myself first is the most important element in maintaining a strong friendship or relationship of any kind.

He doesn’t shy away from sharing his strong opinions and reflections 

One thing I love about talking to Matthias is that he’s bold in expressing his own views and ideas about the world when we have conversations. We don’t always agree on things. He’s stating them in a way so that they are powerful and stand on their own, without landing in any way as a suggestion or something that I should do or consider. He states them simply as his truth and expression of himself.

I greatly value this and often come away feeling enlightened and curious from most of our conversations, without any sense of not having been heard for my own views and ideas. There’s a special ability that he has where he can listen attentively and then still express and share his own strong views, that might differ from my own, but those are able to live peacefully side by side with each other.

I believe this is a rare quality and requires a vast amount of self-confidence and the ability to hold two views, sometimes differing ones in one’s mind and body.

He can hold space for me when I’m going through something difficult

Matthias has spent almost 2 decades practicing meditation, spent months living in a monastery, and is a certified Grinberg body coach as I like to think of him. All of this training and practice has helped him to develop a deep capacity to listen and make space for someone’s reality when they bring it to him, on many occasion that reality is mine.

Even if I feel completely disorganized and unsure of myself, there’s room for that to be laid out and with his genuine reflection and curiosity, I’ve had a chance to find myself again and put together the pieces that were in disarray just moments earlier.

I believe that this ability to listen deeply to someone else’s experience without adding any of one’s own ideas or thoughts is among the rarest gifts in today’s world and I’ve only met a small handful of people who can do this to the depth and ability that he can. When I reflect on this, it makes me even more grateful to call him my friend and get the chance to sometimes bask in his ability to be there for me in this way.

He’s determined to chart his own path in thought and in action 

I’ve watched Matthias over the last several years continue to experiment and bring together many of the different streams of wisdom that he’s been exposed to. Most notably, this has been Buddhism, particularly the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as various other forms of mindfulness teachings from different traditions, and the Grinberg Method, a powerful bodywork methodology that centers around the core idea that returning to living in our bodies is the key to regain our aliveness and freedom to live the life we want.

I’ve seen him weave together different elements from these teachings and combining it with his own experiences. Lately and particularly I’ve enjoyed observing him share his experiences from welcoming his first daughter into the world.

I find there are plenty of people in the world who follow this or that methodology or way of thinking and that is fine, but there are few who truly take what they have learned and string it together to a whole new way of looking at the world and that is what I see when I look at Matthias. It takes a considerable amount of courage and the ability to stand alone and by one’s hard-earned wisdom, even if it doesn’t reflect a widely held view. When I see this, I continue to feel encouraged about the views I’m having and feel called to share with the world and that is a sweet and valuable thing to me.

He’s vulnerable and willing to share his shortcomings and difficulties 

On a number of occasions, I had the chance to hear from him about what he’s deeply struggling with. Experiences he feels ashamed about, sad, angry, and frustrated. Not only do I value this vulnerability and honesty so much in a friend, I do so even more because it is tied to a fundamental understanding in him that being with and observing these feelings of his will lead him to more insight and transformation, even if it feels like hell at the moment. To me, this always shines through, in part, because of Matthias’s ability to have learned how to express his difficult feelings and emotions both to himself and myself in a way that clearly takes responsibility for these feelings and rarely do I notice him projecting them onto others, even if he notices the triggers from others.

In particular, I’m valuing how he’s able to come to me about difficulties and his own shortcomings in our own relationship, something that is on a whole other level of intensity, and most people I know wouldn’t do that and leave it under the rug or sever ties instead. His capacity to hold that intensity and fear in the body and still come to me about moments where he felt hurt or where he felt he didn’t live up to his own ideals in our relationship are amongst the most powerful moments I can remember, where I’ve learned so much from him and his honesty.

He’s curious about my life and my explorations 

With the success in my life, I’ve had plenty of people reach out to me and want to connect to me over the years. There is no one I can remember however that has consistently been so curious and interested in me and my way of living in the way that Matthias has been. I’ve experienced this in a form where he has no agenda whatsoever other than wishing to stay up to date with my inner world for the sake of genuine connection. I find this incredibly rare and I sometimes wonder where he learned that skill.

Most people have told me they have a sense I live a fast life, where I have many new ideas and experiences and projects that develop fast. To keep up with that and stay interested in the twists and turns, particularly when one idea isn’t quite relevant to me anymore and I’ve moved on to a new one is something that helps me feel deeply held and connected. Some people see what I produce along the way, and through my work and writing, some also see glimpses of my inner world and churnings. Outside of Matthias, there is maybe only 1 or 2 other people in my life that have exposure to the rapid-fire inner world changes on the regular and it gives me a deep sense of being known.

He’s unfazed by my strong ideas and opinions but not untouched 

I celebrate my newfound insights and beliefs with great excitement and candor, to a degree where I’ve heard that it can feel overwhelming for others often. What I value so deeply when it comes to my friendship with Matthias is that he’s deeply able to hear about my celebrations and strong views and opinions, without feeling swept away by them or rocked in his own core set of beliefs. I believe that this requires a deep level of self-confidence and self-esteem that in my path of life I’ve witnessed in a shockingly low amount of people over the years.

This doesn’t mean that he isn’t touched by the things I’m sharing with him that I’ve learned and uncovered. Often, he tells me about how this or that conversation inspired him to look at certain aspects of his life again and rethink the parts that we touched on in our talks. This is wildly different from the above point but shows a genuine curiosity and willingness to let new ideas enter one’s life, without using it as a moment to completely question one’s whole identity.

This is a fine balance and fine line often, but walking it well, makes Matthias such a great and trusted friend for me.

He’s able to hold his own

I love making space for the dear people in my life to listen to them and to help them resolve something meaningful and difficult. I also love it when I see them tell me about a difficult experience that they worked through on their own and told me about afterward. To me, this is a profound expression of someone’s self-reliance and independence, and something I value deeply. With Matthias, I feel almost proud and grateful to hear him share about moments where he went through his own darkness and faced it on his own to tell the tale of it afterward.

It reminds me of my own capacity to be with my own difficulty where I can, without compromising the fact that at times it is healthy to reach out to friends or work with professionals, which I also value doing regularly. Having both abilities, the ability to reach out, and the ability to be with one’s own difficulties and work through them effectively is a fine line and a great skill. The fact that I see him be able to do both makes me smile and grateful to have him in my life.

He invites me to things he thinks I might enjoy 

I get invited to plenty of events and things all the time. Most of the time, it’s to things that the person inviting me wants me to go to because they like it. With Matthias, I’ve noticed something startling and refreshingly different from that pattern. He’s often inviting me to events and experiences from a place of genuine curiosity about whether I would like to go there, based on what he knows about me and my interests. Although quite obvious, I find this another extremely unique and rare skill and gift, that takes a lot of emotional maturity and ability to make space in one’s inner world to wonder about someone else’s experience.

From all the invitations to things I’ve been to, the experience I’ve attended with or by a suggestion from Matthias have been amongst some of my favorite and most powerful ones. Thinking of that and the amount of trust it has built over the years in his suggestions and ability to bring things to me makes me relax and feel more whole and welcome in the world.

Takeaways

What I love about this list is that it so strongly mirrors how I wish to show up for myself and others in my life and seeing this behavior exhibited in Matthias regularly serves as a reminder and training of values that I wish to cultivate even more.

It also fills me with deep gratitude to have met someone in my life that is able to express themselves in such harmony and level of matching with my own views and values about the world. I’ve come to cherish this much more deeply than in the previous decade of my life where I paid much less attention to the relationships I was having in my life and what the actual wishes were for having them.

There are of course other components that support a friendship, like having shared interests or spending time regularly for example. I haven’t listed them here, because although they are important, they have little do with the underlying workings within ourselves that we can work on to be a better friend, to ourselves and to others.

I see this post as a reminder for how I’d like to approach building deep and fulfilling relationships in the future with other people too. This doesn’t mean that I have a demand for this in every person that I meet. It does give me a great roadmap to look out for the kinds of values and behavior I’m looking for when it comes to those people I want to really deepen a relationship with and integrate into my life.

With much love and gratitude to you, my dear friend Matthias!