Can I share a contact list with a second iPhone?

The “master copy” of contacts is maintained on your mail provider’s server. So any device that has that the same email account can also have the same contacts. Add the email account to the second iPhone in Settings/Mail/Accounts. If you don’t want to receive email on the 2nd iPhone just turn off email in setting it up.

You can have multiple email accounts, and can choose which ones you want to get contacts from.

Please read the Apple Recommended post. The way to share contacts is to have all devices install the same email account that hosts the contacts. Contacts do not sync between devices, only to the server that hosts the contacts. You can install the account, then turn off “email” in settings for the account if you don’t want all devices to share the messages.

I think what you can do is have 2 contact sources for each phone, one shared and one unique to the phone. That would require a shared email account for the shared contacts, and a 2nd email account on each phone that would host the “my card” (and any other contacts that you didn’t want to share).

I read and understood the Apple Recommended post. Unfortunately, I was having an issue with the "my card" feature across accounts where the contacts were shared. The 'my card" would, without prompting, change to the other person. Apple's response "According to our engineers, they had mentioned that we would need to ensure that only ONE Apple ID’s contacts are currently connected to the device at a time."

So....

Any suggestions for sharing contact lists between family members. The overlap of family and friends is high, and it "feels" like there should be a way to have shared contacts which update across Contact lists.