Treasure your friends

• Society seems to have a hierarchy for love: parental > romantic > friendship
• However, friendship seems to be demonstrably the most important love in our lives: It is highly correlated with health and happiness.
• Friendships are getting more important as more people choose to live without children and also detach from their parents.
• Friendships are chosen: we have no obligation to keep them, differently from romantic of family relationships
• Friends have shared identity, family has shared blood, lovers have shared attraction.
• Friends are usually more similar to each other than lovers.
• Friends are usually more open, truthful, and relaxed than lovers.
• Romantic relationship, especially heterosexual, has a natural cognitive cost of two "different" minds trying to find harmony. With same-sex friends, the barrier to communication is lower. The perspective towards life is generally more similar.