Rhaina Cohen

In 2021, in a moment of morbid curiosity, Charlotte and Raffi Grinberg decided to calculate how much they would see their best friends for the rest of their lives if they continued visits at their current rate. The math was bleak: They’d spent more days with their friends in the years when they were ages 13 to 30 than they would spend from ages 30 to 100.
Charlotte and Raffi, who’d been married for six years, each had been inseparable from their respective best friends in adolescence.

Rachel Simmons was raised Catholic and later joined a Presbyterian church, but she told me the closest thing she’s ever had to true religion came from a childhood friendship. When she was in middle school, she and two other kids, Margo Darragh and Sam Lodge, formed “RMS”—a name combining each of their first initials—that elevated their friend group to a sacred entity.

Photographs by Victor LlorenteFor decades, when Liz Cutler’s husband, Tom Kreutz, did something that bothered her, Cutler would sometimes pull out a scrap of paper from the back of her desk drawer. On it she would scribble down her grievances: maybe Kreutz had stayed late at work without giving her a heads-up, or maybe he’d allowed their kids to do something she considered risky. The list was Cutler’s way of honoring a promise she and her husband had made.