What do you value in friendships

About anything and everything. I love when my friends and I connect over stories, experiences, and shared interests, but I also love it when they introduce me to new things.

Not necessarily because we're actively teaching each other or providing a service to each other either, but because they make me think, ask hard questions, and challenge me.

This has meant the most to me when I wasn't at my prime, e.g. in middle school when I had braces, horrible fashion sense, and bad hair but still had a strong group of friends that stuck by me (to be fair, none of us were really doing that well in the looks department, which is hard because good looks are the most valuable currency in middle school).

I differentiate this from loyalty because, in my mind, loyalty speaks to some element of competition or almost tribalism among people whereas being there for a friend speaks to supporting each other when faced with a challenge.

Humor is one of my favorite parts of life. If I can't laugh with someone, I know we're missing something important in our relationship.

This is so important to me. I can't stand friendships that feel disingenuous or hypocritical. I also would rather have a friend that tells me a hard truth than one who tells me simply what I want to hear, even if it's a hard pill to swallow in the short-term.

To be contrasted with "niceness". Kindness speaks to manner, whereas niceness speaks to... agreeability, maybe? I value friendships where the other person is kind to me. Judging by my closest friends, I guess I also value people who treat others with compassion and respect. Maybe you could call it good-heartedness?

Now, I don't need my friends to agree with me on everything. I have friends who are very religious, others who aren't religious at all, friends from different cultures that value individualism vs. collectivism, and they all enrich my life in some way (otherwise, I wouldn't consider them my friend). I get along with them because I like them and appreciate things about them, irrespective of ideological affiliations. If a person's ideology/values contrasted with the values that are most important to me though (e.g. be a person of integrity, be somewhat of a skeptic...), I think I would have a hard time being friends with them.