The Enduring Friendship

Written by Lisa-Jo Baker of the (in)courage women's community, Never Unfriended, is a step-by-step guide to friendships you can trust with personal stories and practical tips to help you make the friends, and be the friend, that lasts.

On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said seventeen dollars, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas. Speed was taken with his visitor, but, as he said later, "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face." Speed suggested Lincoln stay with him in a room over his store for free and share his large double bed. What began would become one of the most important friendships in American history. Speed was Lincoln's closest confidant, offering him invaluable support after the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, and during his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln needed Speed for guidance, support, and empathy. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln is a rich analysis of a relationship that was both a model of male friendship and a specific dynamic between two brilliant but fascinatingly flawed men who played off each other's strengths and weaknesses to launch themselves in love and life. Their friendship resolves important questions about Lincoln's early years and adds significant psychological depth to our understanding of our sixteenth president.

After years of taking a backseat to other relationships, women's friendships are finally being celebrated as never before. In Connecting, noted journalist Sandy Sheehy investigates why female friendships are so important, how they function throughout our lives, and how we can best experience the joys they offer. Sheehy introduces ground-breaking research, drawn from more than thirty psychologists and sociologists. Their intriguing, often surprising, findings are brought home with real-life stories and keen insights taken from more than two hundred interviews the author personally conducted with girls and women of all ages, races, and walks of life. The author provides a fascinating look at the qualities that initially attract women to their closest friends; how friendships change throughout life; and hwy female bonding is a vital part of a woman's psychological development, health, and sense of well-being at any age. Sheehy addresses such thought-provoking questions as: Why is making friends so easy for some and hard for others? How can friendships help us become better, more fulfilled people? What are the key ingredients to lasting and satisfying friendships? Recognizing how our relationships serve different needs aat different times in our lives, the author describes the ten basic types of female friendship--from soulmates to workmates--and shows how each nurtures and supports us. Sheehy then examines the six seasons of friendships, from girlhood to old age, devoting a separated chapter to the special characteristics and rewards friendship offers each age group. Just as important, she tackles the thorny issues, delving into the challenges that can strain and even shatter friendships, and offers sound strategies for handling difficult situations. And in "Sixteen Steps to Having Friends for Life," Sheehy shares the secrets for keeping and enriching friendships. In Connecting, Sandy Sheehy takes us on a journey of discovery and appreciation of the rich rewards of this special intimacy, pointing the way to growth-promoting, life-enhancing relationships--to becoming the best of friends and enjoying the best of friendship. How do friendships between women evolve at different stages of life? How do they differ from men's? Why can some women make friends easily while others have none at all? What are the key ingredients to lasting and satisfying friendships? Drawing on recent psychological research and her own firsthand interviews with more than 200 girls and women from all walks of life, journalist Sandy Sheehy takes an engaging and insightful look at these questions and more. She probes the nature and history of female friendships, pinpoints the major types, and shows how they function during the four main stages of women's lives and how they insure our healthy development. This book reads like an intimate and informative conversation with a close girlfriend. It will validate and reassure women about their friendships as never before.

The rare book dealers who delighted readers with the history of their bookselling days in "Old Books, Rare Friends" offer an intimate look at the joys of a friendship that has lasted more than half a century. of photos.

Friendships are difficult. Sometimes it can seem as if friends are more work and pain than they're worth, with friendship challenges that we have to endure and struggle through. Life gets in the way of our well-intentioned efforts to connect. Conflicts and differences over serious issues divide us and make us think that we could never be close to a person ever again. In today's cancel culture, it's easy to give up on people and just walk away, leaving us all more isolated than before. How can we build real relationships that are life giving and pass the test of time? Bryan Loritts mines one of the Bible's least-known books for insights into how friendships can flourish even in the midst of sin and brokenness. With careful exposition and insight, he unpacks how the apostle Paul helped Philemon and Onesimus reconcile a most unlikely relationship with truth, repentance, and grace. With God’s work and steadfast love, even the most painful relationships that have ruptured are not beyond the reach of forgiveness and reconciliation. Discover how friendships that are hard can be transformed into friendships that endure.

In Consolations David Whyte unpacks aspects of being human that many of us spend our lives trying vainly to avoid - loss, heartbreak, vulnerability, fear - boldly reinterpreting them, fully embracing their complexity, never shying away from paradox in his relentless search for meaning. Beginning with 'Alone' and closing with 'Withdrawal', each piece in this life-affirming book is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling overwhelmed and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness something that accompanies the first stage of revelation. Consolations invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.