‘Couldn’t We Just Be Friends?’
"Paradoxically, it is friendship that offers us the real route to the pleasures that Romanticism associates with love. That this sounds surprising is only a reflection of how underdeveloped our day to day vision of friendship has become. We associate it with a casual acquaintance we see only once in a while to exchange inconsequential and shallow banter. But real friendship is something altogether more profound and worthy of exultation: it is an arena in which two people can get a sense of each other’s vulnerabilities; appreciate each other’s follies without recrimination, reassure one another as to their value and greet the sorrows and tragedies of existence with wit and warmth."
