How to nurture a deep friendship: Advice from ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ co-hosts

Listening to the podcast “Call Your Girlfriend,” it sounds like co-hosts Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow had the perfect friendship. But behind the witty banter and professions of love, their actual friendship was suffering.

The two lived in different cities for years. They stopped telling each other about big events in their lives, and both felt like they were growing apart.

They knew they really had a problem when they planned a fancy spa weekend to reconnect, and were both dreading it.

Friedman and Sow have since patched up their relationship. But their experience highlighted a fundamental lie a lot of us accept as truth: A good friendship is supposed to be effortless.

Friedman and Sow write about the real work that’s gone into maintaining their long-term friendship in their new book. It’s called “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close.”