Women were friends, I once would have said, when they totally love and support and trust each other, and bear to each other the secrets of their souls, and run--no questions asked--to help each other, and tell _ truths to each other(No, you can't wear that dress unless you lose ten pounds first.) when these truths must be told. In other words, I once would have said that a friend is a friend all the way, but now I believe that's narrow point of view. Friendships serve many different functions,meet different needs and range from those as all-the-way as the friendship of the soul sisters mentioned above to that of the most casual playmates. Convenience friends are women with whom we'd have no particular reason to be friends: a next-door neighbor or the mother of one of our children's closest friends. They'll lend us their cups for a party. They'll drive our kids to school when we're sick. They'll take us to pick up our car when we need a lift .As we will for them. But we don't , with convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much; we maintain our public face and emotional distance. Special-interest friends aren't intimate ,and they needn't involve kids or cats. Their value lies in some interest jointly shared .And so we may have an office friend or a tennis friend. "I've got one woman friend," says Joyce," who likes, as I do, to take music courses, which makes it nice for me and her. I'd say that what we're doing is doing together, not being together." Crossroads friends are important for what was for the friendship we shared at a crucial ,now past, time of life. A time, perhaps, when we roomed in college together or went together through pregnancy, birth and that scary first year of new motherhood. Crossroads friends develop powerful links, links strong enough to endure with not much more contact than once-a-year letters at Christmas. And out of respect for those crossroads years, for those dramas and dreams we once shared, we will always be friends. Crossroads friends seem to maintain a special kind of intimacy ----dormant  but always ready to be revived  ---and though we may rarely meet ,whenever we do connect, it's personal and strong. Another kind of intimacy exists in the cross-generational friendships, the friends that form across generation in what one  woman calls her daughter-mother and her mother-daughter relationships. There are good friends, pretty good friends and very good friends, and these friendships are defined by their level of intimacy. We might tell a good friend, for example, that yesterday we had a fight with our husband. And we might tell a pretty good friend that this fight with our husband made us so mad that we slept on the couch. And we might tell a very good friend that the reason we got so mad in that fight that we slept on the couch had something to do with a girl who works in his office. But it's only to our very best friends that we're willing to tell all, to tell what's going on with that girl in his office. What can we know about convenience friends?
People may share their sorrow and pain with their convenience friends. People may borrow a large sum of money from their convenience friends. People may ask their convenience friends to pick up their children for them. People would like to seek comfort and convenience from their convenience friends.