Don’t you hate it when you’re with a friend and you rave about an awesome experience you enjoyed or are complaining about an event that seriously let you down and you’re expecting to hear an empathetic, or at least validating, response and your friend counters with a statement that is like a total reverse image of what you just shared? Or do they quickly point out a hole in your story, a mistake in your recall, or some other minor thing that doesn’t really change the meaning of what you’re sharing or the validity of your experience? One of the basic rules of friendship is to support each other (Degges-White & Van Tieghem, 2015), so when a friend always seems to think they know better than you, it can leave you questioning the friendship.

One of the basic functions of friendship is to provide us with self-validation (Fehr & Harasymchuk, 2018), which means that we look to friends to encourage us and affirm our worth. Our need for validation of whatever we’re feeling, happy, sad, scared, or angry, is totally normal and another way to feel a sense of belonging among others. We need to be a part of a community and when our feelings are validated, we feel seen and heard.

Seriously, when it comes to friends who always........

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