Friendship

My best friend, Olivia, and I met in a fiction-writing class many years ago. We bonded in an instant during the discussion of one poor soul's incomprehensible story involving a woman who'd undergone surgery and was described delicately as having lost "that which made her a woman." Suddenly, out of my mouth sprang my impersonation of Monty Python's Eric Idle, "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?" Every other student in the room looked at me as if I'd lost my mind, but Olivia snorted with laughter. Thus, a friendship was born.

When people are asked, "What gives meaning to your life?" friendship figures at the top of the list. Yet the dynamics of friendship have remained mysterious and unquantifiable. Like romantic love, friendships were thought to "just happen." New research shows that the dance of friendship is nuanced far more complex than commonly thought....