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Friendship improves happiness and abates misery by doubling our joys and dividing our grief.
-- Joseph Addison
There is a traditional concept that friendship should be a conflict-free relationship, a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” arrangement, relying solely on a mutual exchange of favors and compliments as prescribed by good manners. Such relationships are superficial and intimacy-avoiding and do not deserve the name of friendship which is so commonly applied to them…Mutual loving confrontation is a significant part of all successful and meaningful human relationships. Without it the relationship is either unsuccessful or shallow.
-- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
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