Derek Gregory hasn’t been in the same state, let alone in the same room, as his best friend Ringo in nearly two decades. Their relationship dates back to the early 1980s, when Gregory and Ringo met as teens in high school, bonding over a shared taste in music and similar haircuts. With Ringo, there was always something to talk about.

“He was big and expressive and larger than life and fell in love with things and people and ideas and music and whatever it was that he was into at the time,” Gregory says, “and could communicate that passion in a way that is hard to ignore.”

After graduating, Gregory moved away from Southern California, where he and Ringo grew up, but they’ve kept up their long-distance relationship ever since. Now 56, Gregory, a content creator in Denver, still maintains daily conversations with Ringo, despite the fact that the latter currently lives in Australia. They’ll send each other voice notes while sitting in traffic, bits of music they’re working on, the minutiae of their days. Ringo’s lust for life, his “spark” as Gregory puts it, their ability to make one another laugh, to cheer one another on during their best days and to support each other on their worst, is the tether connecting the two men across continents and time zones.

Most people have friends — people to confide in, support, gas up, with whom to laugh, grab dinner, mutually despise the same things. Plenty of studies have underscored the benefits of these relationships: Having friends promotes physical health and well-being, staves off depression and even early death. But what special perks does best friendship confer? What qualities do the top confidantes inhabit that others don’t?

The term “best friend” can hark back to the days on the playground when kids ranked and quantified social relationships for sport. You might think: Do you really need a best friend as an adult? But having — or being — a best friend can be an important signifier. Knowing who rises to the level of a “best” friend can be helpful when weighing the amount of relational upkeep a relationship requires. Fostering a few quality connections may also be more beneficial for happiness than having dozens of less close friends.

“What research has consistently shown in the past three decades is friendship is a reliable marker and predictor of individual well-being,” says Meliksah Demir, an associate professor of psychology at California State University Sacramento. “However, it is not necessarily the number of friends that you have, but it is the quality of your best friendship, along with other friends that you have, that makes a difference in your well-being.”

Centuries of best friends

Although the term “best friend” didn’t enter public consciousness until the 20th century, the concept has been around since antiquity. Among Aristotle’s three classifications of friendship — pleasure, utility, and virtue — relationships of virtue are supreme. Beyond just being fun or useful, these friendships are stronger, more durable, because each member strives to make the other better. Roman politician Marcus Cicero dedicated his treatise on friendship, “De Amicitia,” to his best friend Atticus. As early as the fourth century, best........

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