🧩 When It "CLICKS" into Place

Projects, puzzles, and murder mysteries give me enjoyable moments.

Working and struggling with a sudoku puzzle until filling in one number unlocks the rest of the squares is satisfying. Millions of people enjoy the predictable brain tease and challenge of knowing the puzzle can be unlocked. The same is true for physical labor when a wall takes shape, the lawn is mostly mowed, or an engine is almost put together.

We start to enjoy success before the very last piece of a puzzle is dropped into place.

So why do we give up so easily on our friendships? Just like different puzzles, projects, and mysteries have unique challenges, twists, and turns we can expect the same to be true for every friendship. What keeps us from enjoying overcoming problems rather than being exasperated?

Men usually have a narrower bandwidth of relationship tolerance than we care to admit. I’m sure you can add items to this list of why this is true.

• Hard to admit weaknesses

• Less informal training for healthy men’s relationships

• Smaller emotional vocabulary

• “Successful friendship” is not defined

• Collecting friends who are similar to our temperament and culture keeps us from growing emotional abilities

What would happen if you and your friend celebrated the “click” of a breakthrough before arriving at the final solution?

• Could you deal with more struggle knowing everything does not need to be perfect before you can relax?

• Would it be possible to risk new levels of vulnerability?

• How would trust change?

• What will cause a shift of success to move from the idea of completion to enjoying building our friendships?

Friendships grow stronger when we enjoy the “breakthrough before the breakthrough.”