Highlessers, we're taking a few weeks off to prep for our next season, but in the meantime, here's one of our favorite episodes. Enjoy!

The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick. The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.

I'm Steve Alman. I'm Cheryl Strait. This is Dear Sugar's.

Oh dear song, won't you please?

Share some little sweet days with me.

I check my bell by every day.

Oh, and this sugar, you'll see in my way.

Hey Steve.

Hey Cheryl.

We're going to be talking about friendships today.

Yes, we're going to focus on friendships, troubled friendships, and I'm certainly not happy that these letter writers are in friendships that are painful, but I'm happy to be able to talk about friendship, because it's a relationship we get lots and lots and lots of letters that have to do with marriages, romantic relationships, related to relationships, related to relationships and relationships.

But the thing about friendship is that it is profound to us, it is deeply important to us, and yet there's a kind of code of silence around it, because it is, if you think about it, a relationship that is purely voluntary.

It is, and in some ways I think it makes it harder to have conflict with a friend, it certainly feels riskier to me than, you know, when I'm upset with my husband, he knows that I can talk to him about there's that level of, I guess, trust and familiarity and unconditional love that you feel like you can risk conflict and come out the other side.

With a friend, it becomes a lot more complex. Do you find that you're more hesitant?

Oh, absolutely. The whole relationship, the nature of the relationship is incredibly tenuous.

Like you said, it's volunteer, you're here there to have fun, you don't want to cause trouble.

That's right, and think about how many books there are that are about marriages or family, and investigating the, you know, underside or the dark side of those relationships, and how few there are about friendship.

Tim Kreater wrote this amazing book that I love called We Learn Nothing. It's a book of essays. He writes about the painful process of what he calls defrending, and I just want to sort of read this to frame what we're going to talk about a little bit.

He says defrending isn't just unrecognized by some social oversight. It's protected by its own protocol, a code of silence, demanding an explanation, wouldn't just be undignified.

It would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous. It is purely voluntary.

You enter into it freely without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing.

Right.

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