Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody.

Friendship comes in as many flavors and varieties as ice cream. Some kind of friendship requires hard work, similar to an occupation. Other kinds of friendship can be meaningful, enduring and emotionally enriching despite long periods of neglect, springing to life with only a brief touch. Relationships with parents and siblings are often an intense type of friendship that can last a lifetime, run hot or cold and often require a great deal of work to maintain. The same can be said of relationships with a spouse or partner. While they are emotionally demanding and time consuming, these intense types of relationships offer profound rewards that are not often achieved in less intense relationships. The aforementioned benefits include love, nurturing, trust and emotional, financial and social support.

In contrast to deep family relationships that often entail hard work, other types of friendship can flourish, go dormant, and easily spring to life again. Friends found in early life, such as childhood school buddies and roommates from young adulthood often form close relationships. These types of friendship do not require hard work, as one’s job might, because they are formed from natural affinity. If hard work were required, these types of friendship would fall apart early, allowing other more natural relationships to develop. However, these kinds of friendship many times are interrupted when education, family and career draw friends in different directions. Sometimes friends from early life lose contact for years, even decades. Friendship encompasses a wide range of emotional connections. Some develop easily with little work and suffer little from long periods of neglect. Others require continuous and hard, sometimes emotionally wrenching work to maintain, but may achieve an intense, rewarding type of friendship that is deep and durable throughout life.