Forgiving others is a very subjective and complicated process. Everyone has their own set of morals and ethics, which means that everyone has a different view of what can be forgiven and what it means to forgive. I think that the hardest people to forgive are the ones who are the closest to you. If someone else wrongs you, it is easier to forgive, because you most probably don’t expect much from that person anyway. If someone who is close to you however, a friend or partner for example, then for them to do something which requires forgiveness means that they have betrayed your trust to some extent. I think that the level of trust breached determines how easy it is to then forgive someone. I think if someone made a genuine mistake and this hurt you, then there is nothing to forgive, but if someone intentionaly betrays your trust or does something even though they know it will hurt you, then this makes it much more difficult to forgive.

In my opinion, everything can be forgiven, but not forgotten. For one thing I we must learn from our mistakes, so to forget an instance would leave yourself vulnerable to being hurt in the same way again. Obviously it is easy to say everything can be forgiven, but you never know how you will react when youfind yourself in that very situaion, where you have to decide whether or not you can forgive someone. Even though I think everything can be forgiven, that doesn’t mean that the relationship between the forgiver and the forgivee will go back to the way it was. It is not always possible to trust someone to the same extent as before and even if it is, trust is something which has to be earned back.

Before there is authentic love, there is deep and meaningful friendship. How well do we know this yet act as if we don't? We sometimes jump into relationships one after another and act as if friendship, one that takes time to establish and nurture, is overrated. Fact is, friendship is underrated.

Friendship is a great blessing in life. But perhaps we, adolescents who are about to discover feelings for the opposite sex, have not fully understood why friendship can and does very successfully start and sustain the romantic love we all look forward to later on in life.

What most people never take the time or effort to understand is the beauty of naturalness in friendship. Let's imagine ourselves with our circle of friends or with our best friend? Aren't we at total and complete ease? Aren't we just comfortable of ourselves in front of them? There are times may look our worst and our best, we expose our worst traits and display our best ones? We show and tell them our feelings, our past hurts, or our fears and even embarrassing moments. We really bare our souls to them. These things we tell because we trust them, because they have been honest with us through time. And if this is the quality of friendship we share, shouldn't we be able to share the same to a person we want to be with as a spouse? If we make the time to invest this much and open ourselves up this much to friends, shouldn't it hold the same for our life partner? Of course.

Friendship allows us to see pleasant and unpleasant things that will elate us and disappoint us, things that will make us laugh and cry, things that will make us proud and frustrated. We do not hold these back from our friends; they just have to know. We know our friend's joys, fears, weaknesses and strengths, good and bad habits, what makes them angry and what makes them laugh, what they believe in and stand for, where we could learn from them. We understand them in a way most people don't.