As a rule, friendship is considered an unalloyed good, one of life’s happy-happies, like flowers and fresh fruit. “Report: It Would Probably Be Nice Having Friends,” read a recent headline in The Onion. Ha ha! Of course it’s “kind of fun” and “pretty cool” to “have a few select people in your life to do stuff with on a regular basis.”
Most people can name at least half a dozen people they view as reasonably good friends. The only society where people don’t have any friends, according to Daniel Hruschka, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University, is found in the science fiction of C.J. Cherryh’s “Foreigner” series.
Yet researchers who explore the deep nature of friendship admit the bond can have its thorns, bruise spots and pesticide traces.
[For more on this story by NATALIE ANGIER, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...-discrimination.html]
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