Something true i found recently on Andrew Sullivan's web site.

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"Friendship can be exploitive and predatory, a strange symbiosis of quiet underwater carnage, though I’ve seldom seen one stay that way, Yet friends are partly for quarrelling with. Most of us need to squabble occasionally to tap off our toxins, and friends permit us to without inflammatory consequences. We can be a trifle mean, or stumble into a brief tailspin, and be forgiven. Knowing our knotty nuttiness, our self-destructive lonely spells, they let us phone a bit too much and don’t require us to specify just how tricky we feel. Friends are for jitters as well as barbecues." - from Edward Hoagand's essay, "Running Mates," in "Tigers & Ice, Reflections on Nature and Life."
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