More than exercise or vitamin C, friendship appears to be essential to human existence. Everyone wants a friend or six. The need is felt long before we learn to tie our shoelaces, and it doesn’t seem to matter if one is Orphan Annie or born into a large and loving family. It continues all our lives despite distractions; our hunger for love, sex, money or power may be discarded somewhere along the road. Our hunger for friendship persists to the last breath.

Yet friendship is difficult to define. It is certainly different from love, either romantic or familial. It comes in assorted depths and tonalities. It defies prediction or analysis. Sometimes I think we know much more about frogs than we know about friendship, yet most of us could live forever without the company of frogs, and hardly a week without seeing at least one friend.

A friend of a friend told me about a couple of young women who graduated from high school last summer. They became best friends when they were 5 years old in Detroit. Many years ago, one of the friends moved with her family to Indianapolis. The other stayed in Detroit.

Both sets of parents expected the friendship to fade and eventually disappear. It didn’t. There were constant phone calls, letters and exchange visits whenever possible. Despite time and distance, the bond held.

Last spring, Indianapolis came to Detroit to attend the senior prom of her friend’s high school, the school she would have attended had her family not moved away. Detroit arranged for Indianapolis’ escort. The best friends attended "their prom" together, fulfilling only one of many dreams they hatched through their childhood and adolescent years, undeterred and unintimidated by anything separating them.

I read somewhere that this need for friends is part of the isolation and alienation syndrome from which all human beings suffer. That means each of us senses he or she is set apart from all others, alone in the universe. So, we seek at least one alter ego, a similar being, out of some loneliness in our souls.

That sounds overly dramatic to me, not to mention vague. Besides, most of us have close others, such as spouses, parents and siblings. We are not alone in the universe. We are usually not even alone in the house.

Maybe the hunger has to do with friendship being a totally optional, voluntary and non-institutional relationship. Like other loving relationships, it is absolutely personal. Unlike other loving relationships, however, institutions have nothing to say about it.

We are born into our families, without a vote. Our relationships are locked forever in DNA. When we marry, our commitment is public, it focuses on one person of the opposite sex and it’s expected to last forever, even if it doesn’t. The church and state solemnly record it, and review their expectations for it. Should the partners change their minds later, the courts must approve and solemnly record that, too.

Only with friends are we blamelessly free to choose whom we will love, to what degree, under what circumstances and for how long. The church and state have to butt out. No institution tells us how many friends of what sort we may have. We are free to choose from males or females, or both. We may have as many or as few as we like. We may begin or end a friendship without any declaration of intent or apology.

I think it is this freedom from expectation, scrutiny and regulation that makes friendship so precious. To love and be loved without the tie of blood, without any moral or legal contract, without sexual or monetary expectations, without any expectations at all except for those we choose to impose upon ourselves and can change at any time without penalty - that’s friendship.

Friendship is a most remarkable relationship. No wonder it is so desirable, and so strong.

Yours Truly