While most adults are cautious of strangers, children have no such filter. Their love is open to everyone. They don't overthink before giving compliments, laughing out loud, dancing in the rain, or hugging someone. A two-year-old from West Warwick, Rhode Island, performed a random gesture that warmed hearts and taught a powerful lesson in love, reported CBS News.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Norma Mortenson
One weekend in February 2020, Lindsey Sheely’s family ordered a pizza from "Wicked Good Pizza." When the doorbell rang, the delivery man handed them their pizza and said, “Enjoy your pizza! Have a good night.” Before Lindsey could shut the door, her 2-year-old son, Cohen, rushed out, ran along the porch, and gave the delivery man a hug, chuckling all the way.
“No kisses buddy,” the pizza man said. Cohen’s mother waddled towards her boy and tried to stop him, “You can just blow kisses, okay,” she said to him. This adorable scene was captured on their home’s surveillance camera. Lindsey thought of sharing the clip with her friends and posted it on Facebook and Instagram.
“We thought it was so sweet and funny, then realized that our doorbell might have caught the interaction on camera, and it did!! I hope it gives you a laugh and warms your heart like it did for us,” she wrote in the Facebook post. In an update she later added to the post, she revealed that somehow the pizza man had come across her post. His name was Ryan Catterson. Ryan commented on Lindsey’s post saying, “Thank you so much for posting this! This week has been a rough one and that really put a smile on my face. He is such a sweet little guy.”
It turned out that Ryan had recently lost his 16-year-old daughter, Alyssa. “Little did we know what Cohen’s hug to this stranger would mean,” Lindsey said, and added, “I believe in divine appointments and know that Ryan was the one to deliver our pizza for a reason.”
Ryan told WLNE-TV, an ABC affiliate, that the little boy’s gesture touched him so much because it reminded him of hugging his daughter. "After losing my daughter this past week, it touched me because it was like she was there," he said. "It really just meant a lot to me."
In her post, Lindsey also shared the link to a GoFundMe page that was created to raise money for funeral expenses for Ryan’s late daughter. As the mom described, the little scene indeed warmed the hearts of people. Over 517,000 people viewed her post on Facebook. Plus, the story was also shared in Reddit’s r/MadeMeSmile group where it was upvoted 16,000 times, and 260 people commented on it.
Image Source: Reddit | u/carston1011
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.