I have known my best friend since we were in high school together in the early to mid-80’s. We didn’t have any classes together, so we didn’t really become friends until just after high school. She has always lived in the same place, but I have moved around the country. We could and have gone a long time without any contact, but always pick up right where we left off. We haven’t seen each other face to face in 15 years, but she is still and will always be my best friend and, I hope, I hers. When we talk on the phone, almost daily, we usually laugh so hard and for so long that it really annoys the people around me. I love her to death- she is the person that I would like to become.
The bolded part is something I share with my best friend too. Laughing and inside jokes are a very important part of our relationship. Sometimes, our kids think we’re nuts (or moreso than usual). 
I’m not a best friend kind of person, but then, I am what my mother calls “a Pamplona kind of friend” and so are most of mine.
My mother treats friendship almost as a job. When one of her friends, whom she’d see every Tuesday, died, she took out her agenda and went contact by contact considering who would be her new “Tuesday friend” - my head almost exploded. She believes in “working on the friendship”: setting up the meetings carefully, choosing clothes and conversation with the utmost care… At the same time, most of her “friends” would be about as helpful or useful as a hemorroid, come high water - or she for them in the same circumstances. Except for Rita and much-missed Nike, Mom and her friends seem to spend more time pussifooting and getting on each other’s nerves than having fun or talking straight.
So when she moved to Pamplona (she doesn’t live there any more), the local definition of friends took her a long time to get used to: a friend is someone who’s there for you. When my youngest brother was going to Pamplona for college and my parents were helping him search for a dorm, they happened to run into a couple that Mom would have classified as “former friends” and Pamplona-born Dad as “friends”. They hadn’t seen each other in 12 years, or phoned in 6. They instantly offered their extra bedroom to my brother if he didn’t find a dorm and for as long as he needed it, even if it happened to be through all his time in college. And they, unlike Mom and most of her so-called friends in the same situation would have, meant it.
Most of the people I talk to daily and don’t know from work, I talk to them via email or in WoW. But I have a bunch of friends who have standing invitations to sleep in my guest bedroom, other people who have made similar offers to me, and sometimes I run into one of them and we spend three hours catching on (one time, while standing in snow up to mid-thigh). Works for me.
We’ve known each other since…oh, 1992 or 1993. She was dating the guy who was the best man at our wedding. We discovered that we’re kind of two halves of the same coin. We even look a bit alike - we’re both short, fair-skinned brunettes with blue eyes.
She’s like my evil twin. I’m shy, not likely to take the lead, and while I’ll think all kinds of zingers in my head, I’m usually too wimpy to say them.
She’ll say them, and then some!
We just clicked. Discovered that aside from the men in our lives, we have a lot in common politically, life plans, etc. Hell, we even like our pizza and Taco Bell orders the same way!
Lurking for almost ten years, and this is what I come out to post for!
I’ve known my best friend for over thirty years, ever since we bunked together in my first year at boarding school when we were eleven years old and it turned out we lived barely five miles apart in Riyhad.
I moved abroad and we lost touch during our university years. When I returned we arranged to meet up and it was like no time had passed, we stayed there until closing time, catching up on friends, family, just about everything, both of us convinced (and glad) that the other had put on more weight in the intervening years.
That was fifteen years ago and since then we have been pretty much best buds, I moved abroad again and we’d exchange visits pretty much every month. Then I returned and he moved aboard so I’d fly out to hang out with him too. We shared our mystification, and occasional sadness, when relationships didn’t work out, frequently tried to understand what it was that women actually wanted (still haven’t cracked that one) talked about just about everything under the sun and even more frequently got drunk together. We celebrated our 30th birthday’s together, glad to be older but no more mature, wiser or richer, and we celebrated our 40th birthdays in much the same way. When his father died I was the first person he called and we both cried. To be honest, we both pretty much assumed that we’d never find the right woman (one each that is, not one to share) and that we’d grow to be grumpy old men in the same rest home, yelling at kids to get off the lawn and bitching how nothing was as good as it used to be.
I met someone special a few years ago and he was more supportive than anyone. Then I got engaged, asked him to be my best man and things all went to hell. He laid down a whole six months of passive-aggressive, destructive behaviour, offended just about everyone, reduced my fiancée to tears, I could go on. Come my wedding day the one thing that would have made it better would have been if he hadn’t shown up.
I let the dust settle (weddings can be stressful for everyone concerned), met up with him and, in one of the most uncomfortable evenings of my life, tried to sort it out. The long and the short of it was that he had many fine words of betterment, but it’s been a year and nothing much has improved. He pretends like there’s nothing the matter when we meet, but I’m just going through the motions. It hurts me; he’s still there but the friendship that meant so much, that saw us both through a lot of hard times, that gave us so many good times, is gone.
Sorry for dropping a bummer in this warm and fuzzy thread, mebbe I’d best go and start a thread of my own entitled “Tales of friendship to bum you out on a Friday afternoon.”