Lea Wilson

Real friends naturally boost your self-esteem and in turn, helping out a good friend [in this way] can help you feel better about yourself as well.

Real friends identify them in a mindful manner not to be spiteful, but for accountability’s sake. “They’re able to point out some of the negative things you’re doing in addition to the positive,” Rowney says. “They really support you on both sides.”

A real friend stays present in the moment by paying attention to your needs along with theirs.

How many times have you tried to have a conversation with someone, only for that person to turn the topic back to him or herself? Somehow the venting moments and the catch-up sessions aren’t quite as fulfilling. Conversations with real friends aren’t one-sided.

Being able to have an open, two-way dialogue with someone improves the chances that the relationship is going to be stronger.

People who are good listeners validate other people’s feelings,It shows that what they’re saying makes sense.

It’s one thing to have friends who provide support during times of success. But genuine friends are there through all of our peaks and valleys — the grief, the joy, the failures and everything in between.

To be able to know someone enough and to trust them enough to even allow them to support you through tough times is a sign of real friendships, the people who are in your life like that are about as close to family as you can get.

Genuine friends can sense duress — and thereby assist in making better decisions, Rowney says. And even when we’re not looking for advice, their presence alone can calm us. One 2011 study found that just spending time with a best friend can help beat stress.

While genuine friends celebrate our every accomplishment, they also remind us of our roots. Good friends will keep you in check to some degree and not let your head get oversized, they know the deep-down, base version of you. So not only will they support you when you succeed,but they remind you of where you came from.

Close friends always step up and take the initiative — even if it’s something the other person may not want to hear. Supportiveness is crucial in friendships.

Honesty isn’t always an easy thing, but it’s important to your bond. Swallowing that pill and being the best friend you can by being open with them always works out better.

Real friends understand, and because they understand they are capable of forgiving.

Rowney says real friends not only stick with us as we grow, but they also make us want to be better versions of ourselves. Friends aren’t just confidants, but role models. Their kindness and other attributes, genuine friends bring out the best in us — which is one of the greatest gifts they could ever give.

Much like with family members, you can go extended stretches of weeks or months without talking and hanging out consistently, yet there’s no doubts about your relationship. Schedules get busy, circumstances arise, but your friendship remains fully intact.

Rarely do you discover anything about what’s going on with them on social networks. You don’t need Facebook to tell you it’s their birthday, or Instagram to see who they were with and where they went last night.

They don’t let you do anything stupid – at least not by yourself.

During the lowest of lows, they don’t give up on you even if you’ve given up on yourself.

There are silences, but they don’t feel the least bit uncomfortable or awkward. If you can sit down and shut up with a person, never feeling obligated to fill that hushed void, you’ve got a special connection. 

True friends make you want to be a better person, just because they make you feel happy, positive and remind you just how amazing you are. They enhance your life and make you want to strive to be the best you can be. True friends look for the good in the bad, not the bad in every situation.

A true friend will always be honest, no matter how hard the situation is. Sure, not everybody is brutally honest, but true friends will tell you if they hear your boyfriend is cheating on you, they will tell you that you have lipstick on your teeth and most importantly, they won’t lie to you about the little things.

One of the biggest indicators of true friendship is if the other person allows you to be yourself, with no judgement. If they’re putting you down about the way you look, act, think or behave, chances are they’re not true friends and want to change you to suit their agenda.

Some people fall off the grid or stop hanging out with their friends once they are in a relationship. Real friends try to balance it out and make time for you.

Real friends are basically free therapists. They will sit you down when you’re upset, listen to you explain your problem and give their honest advice on how to help you, whereas fake friends ignore your problems and focus on themselves.

True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island… to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.

True friends bring out the best in you. They make your life sweeter with their words, their presence, their actions, and behaviors. They enhance you, they enhance your life, and they make you want to become a better person.

True friends inspire you to live your life to your full potential, to be better, not bitter, and to constantly look for the good in the bad, and the beautiful in the ugly.  Always remember, true friends, make you better, not bitter…

Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is.

Your true friends, the people who truly love you, will never try convince you that you should be anything other than yourself. They give you the permission to just be. To be yourself, unapologetically, loving you for you, and not for who they think you should be. True friends give you permission to be yourself.

True friends rekindle your inner spirit by constantly reminding you of who you truly are underneath it all. Because they because they can see beyond all your insecurities, they will constantly remind you of who you truly are underneath it all, helping you tap into your inner beauty, wisdom, greatness, and power.

True friends will help you to live your life from a place of truth, light, love and integrity, no longer from a place of fear and doubt.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

When you turn thirty, a whole new thing happens: you see yourself acting like your parents.

The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

30 is the new 20, unless you’re 20, then it’s the new 40.

Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

In my thirties, I felt I had hold of one of the reins some of the time.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Men reach their sexual peak at eighteen. Women reach theirs at thirty-five. Do you get the feeling that God is playing a practical joke?

When you’re a teenager, all you want to do is buy beer. But once you hit 30 all you want to do is to get carded.

Time and tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of thirty.

After 30, a body has a mind of its own.

I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your thirties and so that’s kind of a natural progression. But I’m definitely drawn to it. It’s probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

I’m turning thirty this year. And you know the saying, a woman over thirty is more likely to get hit by a bomb than find a man.

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.

At age 30, one receives strength.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

To my eye, women get sexier around 35. They know a thing or two, and knowledge is always alluring.

The body is at its best between the ages of thirty and thirty-five.

Thirty five is a very attractive age; London society is full of women who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years.

If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.

Don’t trust anyone over thirty.

There are no available men in their thirties in New York. Giuliani had them removed along with the homeless.

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.

My time has been passed viciously and agreeably; at thirty-one so few years, months, days, hours, or minutes remain that Carpe Diem ‘is not enough. I have been obliged to crop even the seconds-for who can trust to tomorrow?

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us – something more than we could learn by ourselves, from a book.

Every woman in her late 20s goes through a period where she just doesn’t believe love is out there anymore, but it is. And I think the minute you stop looking for it, is when it comes for you.

There’s an ‘Everything must go!’ emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn’t there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we’re not ‘ready?’ You don’t feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.

I’m never so sure as I was in my mid-20s.

20-somethings have the tendency to imagine that their 20s are the last chance they’re going to have to experiment, explore, and party. This is a false premise. Restaurants and cafes continue to let people over 29 through their doors. They even serve them alcohol.

Start your twenties with a lot of friends and leave with a few good ones. What happened? People faded away into their careers and relationships. Fights were had and never resolved. Shit happens.

When I was in my twenties, it felt like I was riding wild horses, and I was hoping I didn’t go over a cliff.

I like getting older. When you’re in your twenties you’re really forging for your future. Things take shape later on.

The path to whatever your notion of success is will likely not be linear. Don’t take continuous personal growth for granted. Just because you’re older doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wiser. Your 20s will be full of failures — let them happen and learn as you go.

When you’re single and in your 20s, you throw on a pair of jeans and look fabulous.

When you’re in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you’ve reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.

The thing I love most about my generation — and something that rarely gets recognized — is that we’re fucking hustlers. We make it work. We get that money. We’re innovative and resourceful. The odds may be stacked against us and yet we still find a way to triumph.

[S]pend your twenties learning how to mentally block out trend pieces about the importance of reaching specific life milestones in a timely fashion.

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven’t dealt with, it comes out. That’s why you have a lot of artists that don’t make it through.

I lived my twenties in a very public manner and if anyone’s twenties are documented it’s not always going to be pretty.

I think, for the majority of my twenties, I was always so concerned with what I didn’t have, or what I still wanted.

I feel like you don’t know if someone’s equipped for a romantic relationship until they’re out of their twenties.

[H]appiness comes out of being willing to do your work in your twenties to find out who you are, what you love.

In my early twenties, I had no idea who I was. And I think that’s one reason you should try different relationships. I’ve had good and bad ones, but I took away things from them that helped me become who I am.

I look back on my 20s. It’s supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you’re making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.

I thought I knew everything about love and relationships in my 20s, the ignorance of youth is bliss. As you get older, you start to realise that you dont really know anything and life is a great traveling journey. Life is unexpected…you just never know whats going to happen.

As a kid I had dreams about being successful, thinking it would be cool. Then, when I was in my 20s, I really thought I had it much more figured out than I do now.

Once I hit 25 and exited the coveted 18-24 age bracket, I was like, “Whatevs. Just wake me when I’m 30.” 26 doesn’t feel much different than 25. They seem interchangeable. They leave the same impression. Both feel very young adult.

My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.

Too many women throw themselves into romance because they’re afraid of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. I won’t do that

Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you. Now it means you’re pretty sexy and you’re taking your time deciding how you want your life to be and who you want to spend it with.

Being single is getting over the illusion that there is somebody out there to complete you and taking charge of your own life.

If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can’t afford to be with them.

Personally, I, Mindy Kaling want to spend like 80 percent of my life hanging out with women.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

It seemed to me that the desire to get married – which, I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women – is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge – which is to be single again.

It is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Working long hours being single helps because your time is yours. Once you have a family your time isn’t all yours anymore. Most of the Mac team, we were in our mid-20’s, most of us were single, and we were able to essentially devote our lives to it.

I love being single. I can come and go as I please and stay out as late as I want to.

You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose.

If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts.

Now I’m feeling how I should. Never knew single could feel this good.

I really enjoy being single again. I spent a lot of time in a relationship and the nearer we came to the end, the more difficult it got. You don’t see things clearly as long as you’re still involved.

You are terrifying, and strange, and beautiful. Something not everyone knows how to love.

I think, therefore I’m single.