Dating is one of the best friend finders there is. I read recently some advice from an elder statesman who said that we should all try and make one new friend every five years. What excellent advice. When we are very young we collect friends like sweets. As we get older we lose some along the way kind of like natural wastage. We fall out and we fall in, we change and adapt and we end up with a core group of our best friends, usually quite small but reliable and close. I think its fair to say that most of us will never have more than a handful of extremely close friends as we grow older simply because its not possible to have very close relationships with so many people. Best friends require maintenance.