Sublime

It’s important to remember that triads are not friendships: they are simply sets of three connections in a network graph

A circle of close friends may serve as a “family of choice,” being there in times of need and celebrating important passages in our lives with us.

The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that we identify with whom we think and feel the other person is, not necessarily with whom he or she actually is.

There is a commitment here, unheard of in psychoanalysis, to affinity between people rather than to a technique of professional help.

“Only family are allowed in. You need to find her next of kin,” was the answer. Strong and Fleming had had a commitment ceremony, officiated by Fleming’s progressive aunt, who’d been a nun for sixteen years. But a commitment ceremony had no legal standing.

I had thought that they might represent something like acquaintances (people you are familiar with, many of whom you probably work with, at around 500)

In the 1960s and 1970s, destitute families often relied on extended kin networks to get by. Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did lit