When I consider my closest friendships, I always ask one thing:  Would we have clicked in the same way had we met a year later?  Five years later? Ten years after? Chances are, we would not. The reasons why we gel more with certain people are almost self-explanatory. In general, most of our friends are close to us in age. It's not at all surprising given we probably met them in school or doing some activity that people in our age bracket might enjoy. I met my closest friends in different stages of my life: one in elementary school, one in middle school, one in high school, one in college, and one at my second job out of college. Three of them are single guys with no kids, while the other two -- the best man at my wedding and a female coworker I recently addressed in a prior post -- are married with children. Can you guess which of these friends I see and talk to more? Indeed, my friendships with these two latter friends has changed drastically since they became p...