Neighbors (The Real Thing Collection, #6)

by Elizabeth LaBan

And yes, we fell in love—not in a romantic way, but in the way that female friends do when they feel intangibly connected.

Back when I was growing up, pop culture gave us Laverne and Shirley, Lucy and Ethel, Thelma and Louise, the Golden Girls. But as important as these women were to one another, there was little or no public conversation about their relationships, no acknowledgment or celebration of their role being equal to that of a romantic soul mate—or, dare I say, sometimes more important. So many of my generation and I were convinced that when we found our romantic partner—our Disney prince, the hero of our own personal rom-com—our friends became ancillary, extras in the movie of our lives. But the truth is—and it took a long time for me to learn this—my friendships with Elizabeth and a small, sacred group of other women would become the reason I feel safe in the world. It’s been eighteen years, and through every major change of my life, I have chosen Elizabeth.

I was looking for a friend, someone with whom to share my long days as a new mom. And she looked so glamorous, with her Hobo purse and designer sunglasses. She looked so much a part of the world, while my world had shrunk.

Pop culture, psychology, and the Internet have given birth to an entire cottage industry for dealing with romantic breakups, but the heartache of potentially losing a friend—of losing our person—is discussed publicly far less frequently.

“For whatever reason, we don’t have social mechanisms in place to convey the power of our devotion, or express our pain at its loss.” My

We were deep in the gray of our friendship that day. But the relationships that mean the most to us are often the most confusing and hard, and you get through the pain because you choose to or not. You choose that person. And I still chose her.

One of the novels we reread while we were writing ours was Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. In it, Stegner describes the characters Charity and Sally as “stitched together with a thousand threads of feeling and shared experience.”

In their hilarious 2015 TED Talk, friendship icons Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin call female friendships “a renewable source of power.”

“the power, and often the wisdom, of what women seek and find in friendship could lead future generations into lives of dignity, hope, and peaceful coexistence.”

the beautifully outspoken Roman Catholic nun Sister Joan Chittister, in her book The Friendship of Women, describes female friendship in a way that resonates most for us: it “binds past and present and makes bearable the uncertainty of the future.”