From traditional cards and novelty gifts to all those WhatsApp messages with pictures of flowers and bottles of wine, it seems we love telling our friends how much they mean to us.
I am deeply underwhelmed by this pre-packaged friend-appreciation. It's easy to identify my friends: they are the only people not sending me such greetings.
If you look online for a message or quote to send to any of your friends - the best friend, the crisis friend, the sentimental friend, the new friend, the childhood friend - you will find one. Or a hundred. You will also find many, many articles on how to be a good friend and how to end toxic friendships.
At the core, very little has changed from the days when we (or our older relatives) got that inspiration from Reader's Digest or Cosmopolitan.
What you will be deprived of is much by way of well-thought-out essays or research on either the science or philosophy of friendships.
And why would you want that anyway? Here you are, in the (sort of) words of Dr Machel Montano, 'with your friend and them, your partners straight to the end,' et al. Why do you need to interrogate it?
Friends are the easy part of our lives. They do not come with the sense of responsibility we have to our jobs; not beholden, as with family; not (insert choice of adjective meaning 'complicated') we have with our romantic partner.
This is the precise point at which everything unravels for me. If friends are the only people in our lives who bring good without much angst, why are they the ones who get the least of our efforts?
My friends are not like architectural columns that hold me up. Rather, they're like my spinal column; they are part of me and I'd be incapacitated without them.
A long time ago I liberated myself from the term 'best friend,' because true friends only come in best. And I have more than one.
In my pursuit of someone to back me up on the importance of friendship, I found Lydia Denworth, author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond. In an interview with Greater Good magazine (out of UC Berkeley) she says: 'I think it's useful to remember that science has clarified the definition of a quality relationship. It has to have these minimum three things: It's a stable, longstanding bond; it's positive; and it's co-operative - it's helpful, reciprocal, I'm there for you, you're there for me.'
Aristotle was big on friendship too, but I think that conversation will lead to a loss rather than increase in friends.
Why do we short-change our friends? The most likely reason is the most obvious: because they let us. We treat time with our friends as a luxury at best and a frivolity at worst.
But we drop everything for just about all other relationships, even the bad ones.
In this, romantic entanglements are the most egregious offenders. It starts when we're young and we never learn. Girl meets boy. Boy looks girl's way. Girl forgets fri
