Best Best BEST Best Friends Forever And Ever And Ever

So, there’s a girl I know who I’ll call “Alex,” because that is her name, and also you know her too, because it is Alex Molotkow, lol, hi Alex!!

Alex and I have often joked that we are basically the same person, and we like to list our similarities while watching people’s eyes grow wider as the evidence mounts in our favor: first, and most importantly, our last names mean the same thing in different languages. In Toronto, we lived on the exact opposite ends of the same park, so we could walk in a straight line to meet in the middle. We got our work visas to move to America within the same month, and we had the same lawyers. We… work together, obviously. We lived together when we first moved to New York, and we’ve hosted each other during the overlaps between our various sublets. “Think about it,” I like to say, “Has anyone ever seen us in the same place at the same time!?”

No, just kidding, I swear this has not all been an elaborate ruse to masquerade one person as two bloggers and editors, ha ha, *shifty eyes emoji.* There’s a long list of ways that we’re different. We have different — complimentary! but still different — taste in music, movies, books. We have pretty different taste in food, and in the kinds of people we find attractive. We’re not the same. There’s just something really comforting about pretending that we are for brief periods of time.

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for The New Yorker

On Friday, after Toni Morrison, I went to see Emily Nussbaum interview Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer and they were predictably wonderful. A good portion of the conversation was all about the relationship between Abbi and Ilana, the characters, as well as the working relationship between Abbi and Ilana, the people. They talked a little bit about what will happen to the characters; could they possibly stay as close as they are, even in that fictional Broad City bubble? Probably not, they conceded. Friendships tend to naturally disintegrate as you age into your 20s, even if the intensity levels stay the same, or maybe especially so. It’s hard to maintain that kind of all-encompassing intimacy (and even harder to maintain those levels of sameness) in a decade that sees so many personal changes.

Ilana briefly mentioned the concept of “twinship,” a concept that I hadn’t heard of before, but which Google tells me is part of a psychological theory by Heinz Kohut that plays on the idea of Freud’s “doubles,” or Lacan’s mirror stage, where little kids want to see the people they like as identical to them because they’re so narcissistic and, duh, true maturity is the ability to tolerate differences in others.

The concept of finding a long-lost twin, even in superficial similarities and coincidences like names and tastes, is exhilarating. It’s like, ok, now I’m not alone in this terrible sea of experiences and emotions we call life, I have someone and they have me and we’re going to be each other’s life preservers, should we take this water metaphor to its logical conclusion. And in your early 20s it’s kind of convenient, if not outright easy, to just always float beside your friends, because they’re there; my closest friends of this decade have, as evidenced by the above story, almost always lived and worked right beside me! It’s easy to marvel at how lucky and blessed we are to find these twins in such close proximity, but their proximity is kind of what makes those similarities apparent. Later in life is when you have to start contemplating things like distance and space and time, the responsibilities of maintaining a friendship that doesn’t just follow its own momentum. The whole thing feels less like a miracle and more like an effort with high stakes (the whole thing could fall apart) and equally high rewards (the whole thing could just get better and better as you get older and, fingers crossed, cooler, as I suspect Alex and I will in the next few decades). Friendship over time is, maybe, less about feeling the exact same way or sharing the exact same personality traits and more about trusting that both of you can float your own boats.

With that in mind, let’s watch the best scene from the best episode of Broad City real quick.

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