Summary
To understand how friendships are unique and distinct, the varieties of friendships, the ways you can communicate so that your friendships survive and thrive, the challenges to friendships, and how to overcome those challenges.
Friendship is a voluntary interpersonal relationship characterized by intimacy and liking.
- Friendship has numerous distinguishing characteristics, whether the relationships are casual, close, long-term, or short-term.
- Friendship is a voluntary, mutual desire to create such a relationship.
- Friendship is driven by shared interests, and tends to change when interests and activities change.
- Changing interests is a common cause of friendships ending.
- Friendship is characterized by self-disclosure. The more you consider a person a friend, the more you will disclose—and vice versa.
- Friendship is rooted in liking, which comprises affection and respect.
- Friendship is volatile and unstable because of the differences in depth of commitment as compared to other types of relationships.
- There are a variety of functions of friendship.
- Communal friendships enable people to share their life events and activities with others. Communal friends get together as often as possible.
- Agentic friendships enable people to accomplish personal and professional goals. Agentic friends are available to each other on an as-needed basis.
- The role and importance of friendship changes across the life spans of the participants in the relationship. As we transition from childhood to adolescence, we rely on friends as our primary source for support, rather than parents.
- Culture and gender shape ideas about expectations regarding friendships. Despite the fact that some cultures stereotype male same-sex friendships as being agentic or female same-sex friendships as being communal, studies show both genders rate the importance of friendship equally.
- Euro-American men tend to avoid direct expressions of affection and intimacy in same-sex friendships, owing to such factors as homophobia.
- Communication technologies have reshaped the way people create and maintain friendships.
- Social networking allows friendships to develop quickly.
- Technology facilitates constant connection between friends.
- People continue to recognize the superiority of offline relationships and communication.
Three types of friendship stand out as unique: best friends, cross-category friends, and workplace friends.
- Best friends—typically same-sex rather than cross-sex—share deeply personal information, emotional support, and interests and activities.
- Best friends provide identity support that conveys understanding, acceptance, and support for a best friend’s valued social identities (for example, artist, mother, volunteer, etc.).
- Cross-category friendships cross demographic lines and center on shared interests and identity support. Types may include cross-sex (platonic), cross-orientation, intercultural, and interethnic.
- Cross-sex friendships, which are becoming more common, are rarely motivated by sexual attraction.
- Lingering social expectations create challenges, such as friends and/or relatives who believe cross-sex friends should become romantically involved. Accordingly, cross-sex friendships are less stable than same-sex friendships.
- Cross-orientation friendships are bonds between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer (LGBTQ) people and straight men or women.
- For the straight participant, such friendships dispel stereotypes. For LBBTQ participants, such friendships can help negate the effects of homophobia by providing emotional and social support from within the straight community.
- Overcoming prejudice is the key to building cross-orientation friendships.
- Interethnic friendships are bonds between people who share the same cultural background but are of different ethnic groups—for example, a friendship between an African American and a white American.
- Participants in interethnic friendships become less prejudiced.
- Obstacles to such friendships are attributional and perceptual errors; perception-checking helps overcome these obstacles.
- Workplace friendships often involve professional peers, people holding positions of organizational status and power similar to our own. There are three types of professional peers:
- information peers, with whom communication is limited to work-related content;
- collegial peers, coworkers whom we consider friends; and
- special peers, equivalent-status coworkers with whom we share very high levels of emotional support, career-related feedback, trust, self-disclosure, and friendship.
We keep friendship alive by following friendship rules and by using maintenance strategies.
- Friendship rules are general principles that prescribe appropriate communication and behavior within friendship relationships.
- There are ten friendship rules that tend to be shared cross-culturally: (1) show support, (2) seek support, (3) respect privacy, (4) keep confidences, (5) defend your friends, (6) avoid public criticism, (7) make your friends happy, (8) manage jealousy, (9) share humor, and (10) maintain equity.
- Maintenance strategies for friends include sharing activities and self-disclosure.
- Openness in self-disclosure must be balanced with protection.
Three of the most common challenges within friendships are friendship betrayal, geographic distance, and attraction.
- Betrayal is the most commonly reported reason for ending a friendship, because one friend experiences an overwhelming sense of relationship devaluation and loss. To manage friendship betrayal, employ emotion-sharing.
- Some betrayals damage a friendship too deeply to repair.
- Geographic separation is also a common reason for the deterioration of friendships.
- Friendships that survive geographic separation involve people who share a strong sense of liking, admire each other, and consider the friendships rewarding.
- Shared history also helps friendships survive over geographic distance.
- Communication (by phone, letter, e-mail, or Skype) and assurances can be used to maintain friendships over geographic distance.
- A physical or romantic attraction to a friend challenges the nature of the friendship, whether or not both friends feel the same way.
- Attraction within friendships creates anxiety.
- Responses to attraction can include repression (through mental management), transitioning to romance, or creating a “friends-with-benefits” (FWB) arrangement that involves sexual activity.
- A strong predictor of whether a friendship can successfully transition to romance is whether the friends already possess romantic beliefs that link friendship with love.
- To manage transitions to or from romance: (1) expect difference, (2) emphasize disclosure, and (3) offer assurances.
- In FWB (friends-with-benefits) relationships, friends engage in sexual activity, but not with the purpose of transforming the relationship into a romantic attachment. This can often lead to a deterioration of the friendship if one friend wants romance but the other does not.