Friendship: The Laws of Attraction

The conventional wisdom is that we choose friends because of who they are. But it turns out that we actually love them because of the way they support who we are.

My best friend, Olivia, and I met in a fiction-writing class almost 20 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.