And ones that compliment you, too. Good friends should do both. I know, from personal experience, that you don’t always get a choice in who you’re friends with when you’re au pairing. There just is whoever there is and that’s it and you have to make the best of it and you get along because you need someone else to be there for you. But, other times, there are choices to be made and who you spend more time with and others you have polite conversations with.
My best friends are people who’s personalities are quite similar to mine. We don’t all like the same things but we’re not very loud, we like staying at home and drinking tea and being fairly calm. Which is great. As an introvert, I need those people to help me recharge and feel entirely like ‘me’. But I also need loud people. Bright and sparkly and silly and out there people. Because those people let me follow along and be those things as well, which are things I’m not naturally good at. (Which is why, I think, I have two sisters that fit that profile very well and have kept me from getting ridiculously boring over the years.)
They do things like invite me to Valencia last minute and balance my need for a plan and booking things with the adventure and logic of, “It’s a 6:30 am train. It won’t be sold out.” And I balance them out. I balance out their crazy and inject some sane into it. I help keep it all from going completely overboard and overbearingly ridiculous. They push us up to the edge and I help stop us from going completely over it. It’s all about balance and keeping things from staying entirely in one end or the other.
The thing with making friends of opposite personality types is that there’s that thought of, “Are we really going to get along?” You will. If you meet the right people, you’ll get along. You’ll find that you like their sense of humour or they’ll like how you keep calm under pressure. You might both like the same sports team or else have completely differing opinions on something and spend hours discussing your points of view. It keeps things interesting and interesting is good, it gives you stories to tell and photos to post and lets you look at things in a new way.
So go out there and chat up that person who you think might talk just a little too loudly or not plan things very well. Or else that person who doesn’t join in the loud, shouting banter or triple checks the bus times. You never know how they just might surprise you.
P.S. Friends also get to know each other, like I’d love to do in this post from last week.
Things I’m Loving:
+ 20 Things I Learned From Traveling Around the World – (The asterisk next to French in #1 kills me. Because it’s so very, very true.)
+ About studying abroad – (Those first three months, man. Get you every time.)
+ Vancouver for free – (I need to get back to this city.)
+ A guide to Barcelona – (We’re planning on going soon.)
Blue Eyed Sight 