Hi, this is NPR's life kit, I'm Julia Phirland.

The beginning of a friendship can feel very much like the beginning of a rom-com.

You know how it goes, like a woman sitting at her desk and she's got a shiny new job right out of college.

She's just minding her own business, then another woman gets hired and boom!

It's like a little friendship montage.

You know, she asked me to go to lunch.

We meet up on the weekends, we go for a happy hour, and at first I didn't really realize she was trying to make a real friendship.

But she was.

That's Adriana Aero.

We talked to her recently about the moment that she realized that she'd made her first real best friend as an adult.

You know, in the great before times when you could just like go out to dinner with someone without a single care in the world.

We were gonna get together for dinner and we both were living in the suburbs of San Francisco at the time.

And nobody really wanted to come as far south as my suburb and she was like,

Oh no, you like that restaurant all come down?

And I was like, Rit, really?

You're gonna come all the way down here and visit me?

And she was like, yeah, no problem.

I'll just get in the car.

I was like, oh!

For the next few years, Adriana and her friend were the portrait of BFFs.

They were texting all day, they were talking on the phone for hours.

They kept it up as they started new jobs and their lives changed around them.

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