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It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom 'Friends' right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.

We just want our friends to have a good time
For those of us born around 1965 or '70 it is almost impossible to imagine an earlier era when friends were the people who went by the wayside when you grew up and found a spouse—or when friends were subordinate not just to the nuclear family but to the extended family. A combination of forces and trends—the poor job environment of the early '90s, the delay of marriage, the new indispensability of graduate education for long-term employment—conspired to create for Gen Xers, when we arrived in it, a friend-centric "real world."
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