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In today's Times, Stephanie Rosenbloom taps into the cult of female friendship. More specifically, she's tracking the "girl crush" phenomenon:

[A girl crush] refers to that fervent infatuation that one heterosexual woman develops for another woman who may seem impossibly sophisticated, gifted, beautiful or accomplished. And while a girl crush is, by its informal definition, not sexual in nature, the feelings that it triggers - excitement, nervousness, a sense of novelty - are very much like those that accompany a new romance.

This is not a new phenomenon.

No, it most certainly is not. From the September 15, 2003, issue of the Observer, Alexandra Marshall wrote:

I have a massive whopper of a crush on one of my girlfriends. Actually, on several. And I'm not the only one. Chat with Libby Callaway, fashion editor of the New York Post, or Janet Ozzard, executive editor of Style.com, and it's girl-crush this, girl-crush that...

Aw, how cute. It's taken Stephanie Rosenbloom almost two years to confess her girl-crush on Marshall's story.

She's So Cool, So Smart, So Beautiful: Must Be a Girl Crush [NYT]