We don’t have to agree on everything to be friends.

Yep. I said it.

This is hard for us to wrap our heads around at times because we're all insecure.

Yep. Every single one of us.

Even the ones who come off confident and are the life of the party.

Yep. That guy chugging beers and fist-bumping everyone in sight is insecure too.

And we think our secular friends want secular us,

while our religious friends prefer religious us.

Our strict parenting friends want to see us disciplining,

while our more lenient parenting friends, want us to whip out our co-sleeping habits.

I see many insecure people who change their opinions around different people and are afraid to show parts of themselves that don’t exactly align.

I see the mom fidgeting as her friend asks her thoughts about school in the fall. I can tell she's deciding what she's going to say because she's leaning toward the unpopular opinion of homeschooling...

…instead, she goes with her friend’s opinion.

I see the mom pretending that she loves every minute home with her kids during covid when she’s actually drowning. When her friend says, “Isn’t homeschooling the best thing?” She almost chokes on her water, because what the what?...

…but, she goes with her friend’s opinion.

And I’ve been guilty of this too. I have a mom friend who’s against iPads. When her family came over for dinner, I used to make them off-limits to my children. But then one day, my kids were acting crazy, and I was desperate to calm the surrounding chaos, so I gave in, and…

…it was no big deal.

Yep. Our friendship survived it!

Because she likes me even though we have different parenting styles.

Guys, we need to learn our worth!

Because whatever we do someone will be disappointed and not agree with us,

but if they’re true friends, they’ll like what we bring to the table.

They’ll respect our views and love us for them,

because those things that make us different are what makes us, us.

And if not, that friendship wasn’t meant to be.

So, we definitely don’t have to agree on everything to be friends.

In fact, I prefer we don’t.

This post originally appeared on the author's Facebook. Her book Living FULL: Winning My Battle with Eating Disorder is available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2O4mJId