How NOT to lose friends and alienate people

Christianity can be a thorny subject in our modern-day society that is based on the principle of no belief which can then be pushed to the limit of cynical thought personified by the "everything goes" principle. While I am in no way Christian and certainly do not believe in any God (aren't I a model citizen), I do feel that some teachings of the Catholic church have their use in making our life more enjoyable and our relationships with others more durable. We are all searching for something in this life and that something is happiness. We might have different definitions of what happiness is or means, but nonetheless I would say it is our purpose in life. However, often enough we try to find it through individual pursuits with a big focus on ourselves and what our needs and wants are. While this method has its merits, it also tends to have the side effect of leaving you alone at night and somewhat isolated. I am not saying that this goes for everyone and maybe some Scrooges out there actually are happy on their own. I say kudos to them for resisting the temptation of needing others to be happy. But for most of us who have been socialized correctly and who need some amount of human interaction in order to be happy, my personal opinion is that we are doing it wrong. Or at least I have been doing it wrong. For many years I tried to do everything on my own without relying too much on others. My favorite things I would do them mostly on my own. It was all about how I was feeling, my insecurities, my priorities. Then I made some changes to my life. I started going out a lot more and meeting a lot of people. But still with the same mentality of focusing on my inner perspective. Now I think I might need a paradigm shift. I have tried it a couple of times and I find it makes conversations, relationships and just life in general better, when you focus your attention on the other person and just actively try to put yourself in their shoes. There is nothing like it! For some people this might seem obvious, but for a young lost kid who has spent too much time on the attention-whore-inducing-syndrome-of-a-website we know as Facebook, you lose that aptitude to appreciate intimate human relationships without it being in the public stratosphere where image is all that counts.

Anyway, what I did want to write here and what induced this long rant was something I read from the Pope about marriage and how to have a successful one. One thing really struck me and made me think. He said that couples should never finish a day without asking each other for forgiveness and without peace returning to their homes. Now you don't need to be married or even in a relationship in order to benefit from this advice. If people just focus on others and put themselves in their shoes for a little while, I am sure that most arguments could be avoided and it would be much easier to forgive each other. If you care more about the other person and about your relationship with them than about your petty feelings, if both are willing to put in efforts in order to solve their issues, then I don't see any reason why any friendship, relationship or marriage cannot work.