I think family friends are the toughest type of friends to make.

Yes, more difficult even than mom friends or the dreaded couple friends (more on those folks later).

I’m not talking about casual acquaintances that you invite to wedding receptions and send holiday cards to, I mean real family friends, another family that you interact with regularly.

The number of people that have to mesh when selecting family friends is just crazy. And besides that, family friends are long haul friends.

They’re the friends you road trip to see because you spent many a summer at the pool together. This is for real people, you could screw this one up (but no pressure).

When selecting family friends the following issues come up:

• Spouses: You might have a best mom friend that you think will be the perfect family friend and then… your husband ruins it. Ok that was mean, but has that ever happened where you have this great friend, you thinks she’s great, your kids love her kids, and your husband thinks her husband is deathly boring, arrogant, stupid, or some other deal breaker? It happens, it crushes a lot of family friend dreams. In order to survive these lengthy family friend outings you have to find a friend with a spouse your husband can at least tolerate. And it works both way, sometimes we will go out with Mr. Spreadsheet’s work friends and their spouse and I won’t like their significant other… cause I’m mean and judgmental. We haven’t done one of those outings in a good long while because I have a terrible attitude. If these family friend outings go as planned, the kids might even entertain each other then you have to talk to these other adults, so you need good ones. You need something to motivate your husband to take the kids to the pool at 9am on Memorial Day (is that just me?), they need friends outside of work too.

• Kids: You need kids who sort of kind of line up with your kids. It doesn’t work if you have three under 6 and they have 1 under 6 months. If you do that your kids are going to throw a major fit, you’re going to spend the entire time discipling them, and every one is going to be miserable… don’t do it. Or maybe do it because the friends are super awesome. Family friend kids need to get along, you can’t have the devil children mixed with the angel children (though we do it all the time). You can’t be with the evil aggressive kids, your kids will have a terrible time and you will spend your time trying to nicely inform your friends that their kids bit yours… again.

• Feelings: Everyone has feelings, but when you select a family friend (cause they’re a unit) you need one that is tough. Sometimes your kids have a terrible day and scream “I HATE YOU!” to their kid friend. Sometimes your husband has a long day/month/week at work and is grumpy and silent. Sometimes you just want to punch someone. Great family friends understand that and have their own bad days. They plan another event with you because they know that deep down under all that stress and the half chewed crackers you are awesome and totally worth putting up with… plus they don’t really want to have to go through the process of making new family friends… so they put up with you.

Finding family friends is like going on a date or auditioning for a play.

Sometimes you get a call back, and sometimes you get a very quiet rejection.

Sometimes the process of making a family friend is super fast, and sometimes it is slow and all of a sudden you realize you have a family friend and don’t know how that happened.

Sometimes you have to try more than once, sometimes the “perfect” family doesn’t work out.

But when it does finally click it’s awesome. So best of luck to all of you out there… who knew there was actually something worse than dating…