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INTRODUCTION

The second half of 2022 was my Wedding Tour of America. Friends who had delayed their weddings because of the COVID pandemic were like shoppers lined up outside Target on Black Friday, ready to seize the earliest days for safe celebration as soon as the doors opened. Over six months, I attended six weddings and missed two others because of travel conflicts. Each wedding featured personalized touches. There was the groom who formed a one-night-only band with his friends, euphoric and sweating through his gilded traditional Pakistani suit with each strike of his drumsticks. A bride who's a poet commanded the attention of hundreds of guests as she shared the poem she'd written for the occasion. Holding a microphone in one hand, the printed-out poem in the other, and her veil a waterfall tracing the back of her dark hair, she read aloud, "We do not belong to ourselves alone." I silently chided myself for not having worn waterproof mascara that day.

As distinct as these weddings were, a commonality surfaced: again and again, brides and grooms referred to their spouse-to-be as their "best friend." One officiant began the vows section of the ceremony by instructing the bride and groom to "hold the hand of your best friend." I looked at the best man, who was just as lean and towering in his three-piece suit as he'd been the day that he and the groom became college roommates—a moment that predated the bride and groom's romantic relationship by more than a year. When the officiant asked the bride and groom to promise, as part of their lifelong vows, to be the other's best friend, I wondered what the best man was thinking. His title had been swiped.

For the last stop on my wedding tour, I officiated the ceremony between two friends who, in my mind, have the consummate romantic partnership. I prepared by reading speeches from people in my social circles who had officiated weddings. I was struck by a few lines in a speech from a woman who introduced herself as the best friend of the bride (her title was, so far, uncontested). After welcoming the guests, she announced, "The most important moment in life is when you meet the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life. The person who makes you see the world as a beautiful and magical place, who validates your every breath. For [the bride], that happened twenty-three years ago when she met me."

The officiant continued, "But eight years ago, she met [the groom]." 

I thought it was a brilliant joke. But then, journalist killjoy that I am, I started to ask where the comedy was coming from. How much of the humor rested on the assumption that friends don't decide to spend the rest of their lives together? Was it really that absurd? My interest in these questions was more than theoretical. I've long thrown myself into friendship with the fervor others reserve for romance. I've announced to people that I've had a "friend crush" on them (turns out, it's a great way to speed up the growth of a budding friendship). I've often joked that I'm a "friend pusher," because I take delight in introducing my friends to each other and watching them form a relationship of their own.

And then came M. We met in our midtwenties, a few months after I moved to a new city, and she stretched my understanding of the role a friendship could play in my life. A friend could be an essential part of my daily routines; we'd commune in her house for oatmeal and rib-crushing hugs before I made my way to the metro for my morning commute. A friend could ask me to be her plus-one at her office holiday party, proudly introducing me to everyone from entry-level coworkers to C-suite executives. A friend could make me feel so smitten that I deliberately limited how often I mentioned her to avoid sounding obsessed—the same self-censoring I'd done at the start of my relationship with my now-husband. A friend could electrify my life.

Having seen through M how expansive friendship could be, I wanted to find people who were ahead of us, who had already redrawn the borders of friendship, moving the lines further and further outward to encompass more space in each other's lives. By the time I came across that joke from the wedding officiant's speech, I had talked to many dozens of people who wanted to spend the rest of their lives with a friend (or friends). Actually, wanted is not quite the right way to put it. That implies an unrealized future. These friends had already been living side by side for years or decades and planned to do so indefinitely.

The first pair I spoke to was Andrew Bergman and Toly Rinberg; Andrew's sister, who happened to be a friend of mine, had told me that Andrew and Toly were so close that she considered Toly her brother-in-law. In 2018, the four of us met for lunch in my office's cafeteria, and I asked Andrew and Toly about their friendship. My office turned out to be a fitting place to talk because the tone of our discussion felt mentor-like, as though I had invited a pair of more experienced coworkers for coffee to talk through their careers. I hadn't before spoken at length to people with the same type of friendship that I had stumbled into with M, let alone a pair of friends who were as committed to each other as they were. Andrew and Toly had met fifteen years earlier, when Toly was the new kid at their high school in suburban New Jersey. His sparse social life consisted of hanging out with his brother and practicing martial arts in a community room next to the public library. A Super Bowl party that they both attended turned out to be their Rubicon crossing from acquaintances to friends; Toly joined Andrew's friend group, composed of about ten nerdy boys who played Ultimate Frisbee and frequented Hoagie Haven after school. Eventually, the two of them formed a one-on-one friendship.