The remaining ones elicit that delicious frisson of flirtation that I believe precludes them from the status of true friends. Friend is an Anglo Saxon word evolved from the Teutonic verb to love. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines friend as one joined to another in intimacy and mutual benevolence independent of sexual or familial love. I am not humiliated or condemned along with them. If my friends offend me I can shed them.
Friendship is lighter than family.
Friendship is a choice that can be repealed at any moment. My two sisters and I all moved far from our rural upbringing two of us to London, one to New York City. We work long days and late nights and often weekends too to meet deadlines. We commute one, two, sometimes three hours a day across cities clogged with cars that move more slowly than horses and carts moved through them in the last century, the last millennium. We have little enough time for our partners and children, for our houses and gardens, for ourselves.