Friendship is a loose bond, intermittent, with no promise to stay around for the duration. Each friendship offers a unique set of commitments. Friends may prick fingers and mingle blood in a pledge to care for you like a sister or a brother, but life can easily take them in a different direction. Asking friends with partners, children and siblings, nieces, nephews and grandchildren, ageing parents, or a best friend of higher ranking, and maybe a lover, to add me to their list of people to care for risks snapping the bond. Friends have to want to do such a thing, and one must intuit which
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