This paper examines how the bonds of friendship are formed, looking particularly at the ways in which interactions with other
people help to mold our sense of self and how
interpersonal communication is the bedrock of friendship. It uses a model of the development of friendship (and the subsequent development of sense of self that any serious and/or long-term friendship entails) developed by L. Long and J. Wood to demonstrate how deeply interactive a process the relationship of friendship is. Using the friendship between the author's mother and her friend, it describes the six stages of friendship that Young and Wood describe as being typical of an evolving friendship. It then connects these at each step to the stage of friendship that actually occurred between and linking these descriptions to other theoretical models of the interactionist model of relational communication.