Shortlist announced for the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards 2025
Shortlist announced for the IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards 2025

Leonie Corcoran

WIN a Life Design workshop package with DEFRÉIN
WIN a Life Design workshop package with DEFRÉIN

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The events, groups and spaces that will help you find your tribe
The events, groups and spaces that will help you find your tribe

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Image / Relationships
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RELATIONSHIPS

The joy of besties showing up when you need them most


by Amanda Cassidy
16th Apr 2023

Friendships are unique relationships. Unlike family relationships, we choose to enter into them. And unlike other voluntary bonds, such as marriages and romantic relationships, they lack a formal structure. Yet research shows how important friendships are to our well-being. Amanda Cassidy hears five stories about how these essential buddy bonds saved us.

C.S. Lewis famously wrote in The Four Loves; “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.” And for many, we can relate. Friendships are the bedrock of our earliest social interactions. Clap handies groups, soft play centres are about movement but they are also the first foundations for communication and relationship development. These early socialisations with peers – even...

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