The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef love, like being enlivened with champagne.

Two different registers of affection get compared here, and the comparison is fairer to friendship than most. One is sustaining and unremarkable and you notice it mostly by its absence; the other is heady and cannot, by its nature, stay at that pitch. Trouble comes from expecting the second kind of feeling from a bond built for the first, or from concluding that a steady closeness has failed because it no longer sparkles.

Consider which of the two you have been measuring your closest relationships against. If you have been holding an old friendship to a standard of excitement, you may be missing what it is actually giving you.