http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2014/apr/14/broad-city-comedy-genius

Abbi and Ilana don’t just reject the exacting standards most women feel they have to live up to, they still feel great about themselves. And their self-esteem is probably directly attributable to their unflinching support of each other and the pleasure they take in each other’s company. This is my true feminine ideal. Not checking off a series of boxes in a race to “have it all,” but recognizing that nothing is ever going to be perfect and investing in each other is always a safe bet. “I dreamed of a world on the screen that looked like the real one, populated with chill women who refer to everyone as ‘dude,’” writes Grantland’s Molly Lambert. “Broad City is that world. May it run forever.” For ever and ever. Amen.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/tina-amy-and-the-female-fckup-a-filmography/ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/the-triumph-of-the-platonic-rom-com/463200/

The women’s partnership, crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance; they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. They are each other’s Happily Ever After. The pair, as Ann Friedman put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives. Which is also to say that Abbi and Ilana are co-stars in a rom-com that is rom-y in every way but the most basic. That they don’t sleep together is, in their world, very much beside the point. The broads of Broad City are straight, for the most part (though “sexuality exists on a continuum!” Ilana points out during the new season). They sleep (or, often, try to sleep) with guys. Ilana has a boyfriend, kinda. Abbi is looking for a boyfriend, kinda. All that is B-plot. The guys (and, occasionally, girls) here fill the traditional rom-comic role of “the best friend,” ranging from the boring-but-supportive to the wacky: They’re around, but they’re very much not the point. Instead, the women’s mental and emotional energies—and those of the show that contains them—are focused on each other. There Abbi is, to help Ilana remove the 12-pound bike chain whose key she has lost and that she’s had belted around her all day. There is Ilana, to soothe Abbi (“Yankee Candle Store, Vanilla Bean; B, B, and B, right when it opens”) after the competitive streak in Abbi streaks a little too hard. (“How DARE you lie to your wife!” Ilana says, when Abbi initially demurs about her participation in Soulstice’s pseudo-Olympics. “I hear your teeth grinding through the phone! You’re at a competitive event, aren’t you?”) There they are, as they always are, to stop everything and help each other out. Their lives revolve around each other. So much so that Ilana’s pseudo-proposal to Abbi after their brushes with tragicomic deaths comes across as not only fitting, but fated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21well.html

Aristotle, in his foundational treatise on friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, wrote that a close friend is “another self”—a person you love for who they are, not for the pleasure or usefulness they give you.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/308654/

But as the 19th century progressed, and especially with the sexualization of marriage in the early 20th century, these older social ties were drastically devalued in order to strengthen the bond between the husband and wife—with contradictory results. As Coontz told me, “When a couple’s relationship is strong, a marriage can be more fulfilling than ever. But by overloading marriage with more demands than any one individual can possibly meet, we unduly strain it, and have fewer emotional systems to fall back on if the marriage falters.” Some even believe that the pair bond, far from strengthening communities (which is both the prevailing view of social science and a central tenet of social conservatism), weakens them, the idea being that a married couple becomes too consumed with its own tiny nation of two to pay much heed to anyone else. In 2006, the sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian published a paper concluding that unlike singles, married couples spend less time keeping in touch with and visiting their friends and extended family, and are less likely to provide them with emotional and practical support. They call these “greedy marriages.” I can see how couples today might be driven to form such isolated nations—it’s not easy in this age of dual-career families and hyper-parenting to keep the wheels turning, never mind having to maintain outside relationships as well. And yet we continue to rank this arrangement above all else!

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/01/marriage-and-two-kids-a-most-scandalous-fantasy.html http://www.colorlines.com/articles/little-known-black-history-facts-talks-outside-family-so-what