I am a Married White Female searching for a Best Friend Forever. It’s not that I don’t have best friends, mind you. It’s that I moved to Chicago three years ago to be with my now-husband, and my closest friends live in New York, Boston, DC, San Francisco, and St. Louis. Everywhere but here.

I always wonder what it would be like to be best friends with a celebrity. Like Julia Roberts. She’s always talking about her BFF Paige, who seems to be a regular Jane like you or me. Can you imagine if your best friend was Julia Roberts?!?!

If you’re looking to meet new people, the most common advice you’re likely to receive is to “join.” Sign up for mixers! Go to a meetup! Enroll in a class! Before I knew any better, I doled out said advice on my very own blog.

Can we please talk about the most awkward moment of a girl date? Because it’s killing me.

When I first started writing about this search in online essays, between the rageful comments from the angry mob came a number of suggestions that I should try religious institutions to find my next best friend. Plenty of people said they made their closest friends in church group. A coworker tells me she met her besties at bible study.

Most of the time, I write about making new friends. How to meet them, nurture them, keep them. It’s important stuff. Equally important though? How to let friends go.

Valentine’s Day is still in the air, so now is an appropriate time to look at the role friends play in romance. According to this survey, it’s a big one.

Last night, while at my cooking club, I suggested that one of my fellow chefs try a delicious restaurant in my neighborhood. “I can’t go there,” she said. “I might see her.” The “her” in question is my friend’s ex-BFF.

For months now, I’ve been anxiously awaiting Mindy Kaling's upcoming book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Then, a couple of weeks ago, as if someone up there was looking out for me, a hearty excerpt of the book was posted online.

 In the early days of this blog, I addressed one of the most obvious friendship questions: Can a man and a woman be best friends? At the time I was staring down the barrel of a year-long friend quest.

This weekend marked another stop on the annual wedding circuit. I’m told that this phase of my life (we’re attending seven weddings in 2011, six of which are out of town) will slow down in a couple of years, but since I’ve already got four weddings lined up for 2012, I don’t see that happening soon.

Last Friday, through the cloud of my sinus-y, phlegmy sickness-from-hell, I mentioned that I recently had a bit of a making friends aha moment. Well, the clouds have parted, I can finally breathe through my noise and swallow without wincing, so I’m focused and ready to discuss.

If you met yourself, would you want to be your BFF? I think about this a lot. I heard somewhere that the usual answer is no--that we often don't like people who are too much like us. Which I can imagine might be true.

I was chatting with a couple during last weekend’s wedding happy hour, when the male half referenced a budding actor that he was “friends with.” Right on cue, his wife looked at him and said, “Are you friends? Or are you Facebook friends?”

When I was on my full-fledged BFF search, going on 52 dates in 52 weeks, people often asked me if I'd call off the hounds if I found The One. There were a few times when I considered it. I'd meet someone so fantastic and wonderful that I'd want to give up on everyone else and just dedicate all my time to that budding friendship.

It's been about two years since I launched my BFF search. As you know, I spent 2010 furiously dating. 2011 was about keeping up those new friendships, and turning "just friends" into "good friends." Now that more time has passed, and some friendships have faded and others have stood the (short) test of time, I have a better perspective with which to look back and see what this search has really taught me.

Over the past two months I've done a number of interviews for MWF Seeking BFF . Quite often, an interviewer will ask me, "We all know the usual ways to make friends—at the gym, say—so why was it so hard for you?"