Caroline Knapp

Life without anesthesia often has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment, gone through without one’s substance of choice, serves to build up an emotional muscle. When you drink away feeling—or starve or eat or gamble or obsess it away—you deprive yourself of the chance to really understand it, to come to grips with fear and self-doubt and rage, to truly battle the emotional landmines that lurk within. Addictions may protect you, but they also stunt growth, prevent you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring your from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you give them up, when you begin to get through those difficult moments, you find yourself flexing muscles you never knew you had. You find yourself growing.
-Caroline Knapp


Sounds familiar right? We women have a gift for closeness. So why was this friendship so wonderfully surprising to me? Contrary to conventional wisdom, sustaining a close, trusting friendship can be a dicey business for women—at least in my experience. This may be true by definition: institutionalized relationships like marriage and family are bolstered by social supports. Friendships, on the other hand, are subject to few rules, few measurable standards of success or failure. When things get rocky with a girlfriend, you don’t cruise the Yellow Pages for a Friendship Counselor. When a friend lets you down or goes through a major life change that makes you feel left behind (marriage, babies, moving cross-country), family members don’t urge you to “work” on the relationship. Friendship bonds can be very real and vital but they’re also among our most transient ties, and so a certain degree of attrition is natural and predictable: people change, they go their own ways.
-Caroline Knapp