Here is an informative reading from my teacher

Friends, Good Friends- and Such Good Friends   

-----------------------------------Judith Viorst

A women friend is a friend all the way, I once would have said, but now I believe that's a narrow point of view. For the friendships I have and the friendships I see are conducted at many levels of intensity, serve many different functions, meet different needs and range from those as all-the-way as the friendship of the soul sisters mentioned above to that of the most nonchalant and casual playmates.

Consider these varieties of friendship:

Convenience friends. These are women with whom we have no particular reason to be friends: a next-door neighbor, a women in our car pool, or maybe, the mother of one of our children's closest friends.

Convenience friends are convenient indeed. They'll lend us their cups and silverware for a party. They'll drive our kids to school when we're sick. They'll even take us to pick up our car when we need a lift to the garage. As we will for them.

But we don't, with Convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much; we maintain our public face and emotional distance. "which means," says Elaine "that I'll talk about being overweight but not about being depressed."

Special-interest friends. These friendships aren't intimate, and they needn't involve kids or silverware. Their value lies in some interest jointly shared. And so we may have an office friend or a yoga friend or a tennis friend. "I'd say that what we're doing is doing together, not being together," Suzanne says of her Tuesday-doubles friends. "It's mainly a tennis relationship, but we play together well. And I guess we all need to have a couple of playmates."

My playmate is a shopping friend a women of marvelous taste, a women who knows exactly where to buy what, and furthermore is a women who always knows beyond a doubt what one ought to be buying. I don't have the time to keep up with what's new in eye-shadow, hemlines and shoes and whether the smock look is in or finished already. But since (oh, shame!) I care a lot about eye-shadows, hemlines and shoes, and since I don't want to wear smocks if the smock look is finished. I'm very glad to have a shopping friend.

Historical friends. We all have a friend who knew us when… maybe way back in Miss Meltzer's second grade, when our family lived in that three-room flat in Brooklyn, when our dad was out of work for seven months, when our brother Mile got in that fight where they had to call the police. The years have gone by and we've gone separate ways and we've little in common now, but we're still an intimate part of each other's past. And who, by her presence, puts us in touch with an earlier part of ourselves, a part of ourselves it's important never to lose.

"what this friend means to me and what I meant to her," says Grace, "is having a sister without sibling rivalry. We know the texture of each other's lives. She remembers my grandmother's cabbage soup. I remember the way her uncle played the piano. There's simply no other friend who remembers those things"

Crossroads friends. Like historical friends, our crossroads friends are important for what was for the friendship we share at a crucial, now past, time of life. At time, perhaps, when we roomed in college together; or worked as eager young singles in the Big City together or went together, as my friend Elizabeth and I did, through pregnancy, birth and that scary first year of new motherhood.

Crossroads friends forge powerful links, links strong enough to endure with not much more contact than once-a-year letters at Christmas. And out of respect for those crossroads years, for those dreams and dreams we once shared, we will always be friends.

Cross-generational friends. Historical friends and crossroads friends seem to maintain a special kind of intimacy _dormant but always ready to be revived and though we may rarely meet, whenever we do we connect, it's personal and intense.

Another kind of intimacy exists in the friendships that form across generations in what one women calls her daughter-mother relationships. and her mother-daughter relationships.

I have in my own life a precious friend, a women of 65 who has lived very hard, who is wise, who listens well, who has been where I am and can help me understand it; and who represents not only an ultimate ideal mother to me but also the person I'd like to be when I grow up.

Part-of-a-couple friends. Some of the women we call our friends we never see alone we see them as part of a couple at couples parties. And though we share interests in many things and respect each other's views, we aren't moved to deepen the relationship. Whatever the reason, a lack of time or_and this is more likely_a lack of chemistry, our friendship remains in the context of a group. But the fact that our feeling on seeing each other is always, "I'm so glad she's here" and the fact that we spend half the evening talking together says that this too, in its own way, counts as a friendship.

(Other part-of-a-couple friends are the friends that came with the marriage, and some of these are friends we could live without. But sometimes, alas, she married our husband's best friend; and sometimes, alas, she is our husband's best friend. And so we find ourselves dealing with her, somewhat against our will, in a spirit of what I'll call reluctant friendship.)

Men who are friends. These friendships can be just as close and as dear as those that we form with women. Listen to Lucy's description of one such friendship:

"We've found we have things to talk about that are different from what he talks about with my husband and different from what I talk about with his wife. So sometimes we call on the phone or met for lunch. There are similar intellectual interests_we always pass on to each other the book that we love_but there's also something tender and caring too."

In a couple of crises, Lucy says, "he offered himself for talking and for helping. And when someone died in his family he wanted me there. The sexual flirty part of our friendship is very small_but some_just enough to make it fun and different." She thinks_and I agree_that the sexual part, though small, is always some, is always there when a man and a women are friends.

There are medium friends, and pretty good friends, and very good friends indeed, and these friendships are defined by their level of intimacy. And what we'll reveal at each of these levels of intimacy is calibrated with care. We might tell a medium friend, for example, that yesterday we had a fight with our husband. And we might tell a pretty good friend that this fight with our husband made us so mad that we slept on the couch. And we might tell a very good friend that the reason we got so mad in that fight that we slept on the couch had something to do with that girl who works in his office. But it's only to our very best friends that we're willing to tell all, to tell what's going on with that girl in his office.

The best of friends, I still believe, totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run_no questions asked_to help each other, and tell harsh truths to each other when they must be told.

But we needn't agree about everything (only 12-year-old girl friends agree about everything) to tolerate each other's point of view. To accept without judgment. To give and to take without ever keeping score. And to be there, as I am for them and as they are for me, to comfort our sorrows, to celebrate our joys.