Meaningful friendships develop when things are intense, and involve peril, beauty, jeopardy, drama and self-development

Our oldest and closest friends – those we might call meaningful – have seen us at close quarters. They know our flaws, our faults, our failures; all the things that might make us less than admirable. They don’t like us in spite of these, but because of them. In the end, friendship is an acknowledgement of our imperfect humanity; built not through... See more

We would be far better off seeking out (or tacitly engineering) encounters in which we both have to struggle together to achieve a common goal. This might be something far out-of-the ordinary – rock-climbing, cliff-diving – or it might be something much more quotidian, like hunting down a hard-to-find ingredient for a meal, or even doing laundry.

We... See more