Mirror, Mirror: The Truth About Best Friends

If closeness forms the basic of friendship, it stands to reason that your best friend would be someone with whom you enjoy super sized intimacy. If I confide that money is tight or my boyfriend's in the doghouse I might detail the money worries or give a blog-by-blow of the dramathon that led to the boyfriend's banishment. We have with our best friends a "beyond the call of duty" expectation. If we supper an emergency-real or imagined- and need to talk, we expect our best friend to drop everything and race to our side.

But according to social psychologist, there's another component to best friendship that may trump even intimacy: social identity support, the way in which a friend understand, and then support, our sense of self in society or the group. If we view ourselves as a mother and a belly dancer only on Saturday mornings at the local dance studio, our best friend is likely to be another mom because she supports our primary social identity.

We become best friends with people who boost our self esteem by affirming our identities as members of certain groups, and its the same for both genders.

Most of us would prefer to think that we love our friends because of who they are, not because of the ways in which they support who we are. It sounds vaguely narcissistic, and yet studies had bear it out.