How to Spot a Mandy: Mirroring and Best Friendships

It is obvious that strong ties between parents and their child provide the baby's first model for intimate relationships and foster a sense of security and positive self-esteem. And parents' responsiveness to an infant's signals can affect the child's social and cognitive development. One essential way to bond is called mirroring, which is copying the baby’s movements and sounds. Mirroring also happens to be how Mandy forms a sense of security and positive self-esteem with her best friend. The dynamic relies on agreement and emulating each other; whoever Mandy’s best friend is, she is as well- and they have likely come to this identity together through People magazine, watered down Christianity/Chicken Soup for the Soul books, ice cream, snow globes, and Bath and Body Works. Mandy uses this best friendship as a tool of self definition. Her best friendship is the sort of friendship that is akin to masturbation in that Mandy ideally finds herself in the other and interacts with the other as if it were herself. These relationships can commence as early as junior high and once Mandy has established a relationship with a best friend, their connection becomes increasingly closer and a shared identity becomes increasingly narrowed down to the core. As these types of friendships naturally taper off for most everybody else by their early twenties, Mandys’ best friendships last far into adulthood.

Mandy best friends: