Tag: best friends
Best Friends: She loves me, she loves me not
QUESTION Hello Irene, I am having a really hard time with my best friend. This whole relationship started out quite differently. She was attracted to me and fell in love with me at the very beginning. I reciprocated these feelings for a while but ultimately realized we weren’t a match, and decided we needed to [...]
Kickin’ It Up a Notch: Julia Child’s Recipe for Best Friends
Like many close friendships, the one between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto was borne of serendipity. These two women met across the miles (in an era long before Facebook or LinkedIn) yet formed an instant bond-curiously, over a sharp carbon steel knife. By 1952, Julia and her husband Paul had been living in Paris [...]
No best friends but plenty of contacts
QUESTION Hi, I have grown up moving around a lot—five middle schools and six elementary schools to be exact. Always being the new kid conditioned me to meet new people. Once I hit a certain point with friends, I find new ones. I guess I get bored or scared. Is it okay to not have [...]
Help! My friend is too clingy!
QUESTION Dear Irene, My best friend has been with me through the ups and downs of life since we were both eight years old. I’m now in my junior year at college. Four years ago, I decided to go to a state school and study to become a vet. I was ecstatic the day I [...]
Friendship by the Book: Let’s Take The Long Way Home
It’s rare that I simply gush over books but I fell in love with Gail Caldwell’s newest book: Let’s Take The Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship (Random House, 2010). As sleepy as I was reading the last pages in bed, I didn’t want the book to end and it’s one of those books [...]
Different strokes: Can this friendship survive?
QUESTION Hi, I’ve had the same best friend for more than 20 years. We were so close that we even have matching tattoos. We don’t live near each other, but have maintained contact and been through school, marriage, kids, etc together. She’s been a huge part of my life. Things started getting tough a [...]
Guest Post: OMG–Now Even the BFF Isn’t PC
By Diane Auer-Jones I read this morning in The New York Times that some schools, teachers, and even summer-camp counselors are working hard to disrupt best friend relationships and, instead, encourage youngsters to be part of big groups. Some schools and camps go so far that they intentionally break up best friends by, for [...]
On losing a best friend – Friendship Day, August 2, 2009
The connection between two friends is often indescribable. It just feels right whenever you are together. When I met Rita, I was an eleven-year-old awkward adolescent. She was a poised, charming and strikingly attractive kindergarten teacher who chose me as the fifth-grade “monitor” to make sure that all the kids in her class stood in [...]
Circles of Friends
QUESTION Hi Irene, I stumbled across your blog, and I think it’s so helpful and needed in a society that seems to place greater value on romantic relationships than friendships. I’m in my late 20′s, and the older I get, the harder I’ve found it to keep deep, meaningful female friendships. We’re growing in different [...]
A “good enough” friend
QUESTION Dear Dr. Levine, I recently got into a fight with a girl named Linda, whom I considered my best friend. She said I was never a "good enough" friend for her, and I told her that I thought I couldn’t be her friend because she was spreading gossip about me. We both agreed that [...]
