People from different cultures have varied expectations regarding friendships. For example, most Westerners believe that friendships don’t endure, that you’ll naturally lose some friends and gain others over time (Berscheid & Regan, 2005). This belief contrasts sharply with attitudes in other cultures, in which people view friendships as deeply intimate and lasting. In one study, when asked to identify the closest relationship in their lives, Euro-Americans tended to select romantic partners, whereas Japanese tended to select friendships (Gudykunst & Nishida, 1993).
Across cultures, friendship interactions are also entangled with gender norms. In the United States and Canada, for instance, friendships between women are often stereotyped as communal, whereas men’s friendships are thought to be agentic. But male and female same-sex friendships are more similar than they are different (Winstead, Derlaga, & Rose, 1997).2 Men and women rate the importance of both communal and agentic friendships equally (Roy, Benenson, & Lilly, 2000), and studies of male friendships in North America have found that companionship is the primary need met by friendships (Wellman, 1992).
At the same time, Euro-American men, unlike women, learn to avoid direct expressions of affection and intimacy in their friendships with other males. Owing to traditional masculine gender roles, a general reluctance to openly show emotion, and homophobia (among other factors), many men avoid verbal and nonverbal intimacy, such as disclosing personal feelings, touching, and hugging, in their same-sex friendships (Bank & Hansford, 2000). But in many other cultures, both men and women look to same-sex friends as their primary source of intimacy. Traditional Javanese (Indonesian) culture holds that marriage should not be too intimate and that a person’s closest relationship should be with his or her same-sex friends (Williams, 1992).
2As defined in Chapter 2, gender is the composite of social, psychological, and cultural attributes that characterize us as male or female (Canary, Emmers-Sommer, & Faulkner, 1997). Sex refers to the biological sex organs with which we’re born. When communicating, people orient to gender, not sex (which they typically don’t see!). But usage of the terms sex and gender by scholars often is inconsistent (Parks, 2007). For example, within the friendship literature, male-female friendships are referred to as opposite-sex and male-male and female-female friendships as same-sex, rather than opposite-gender and same-gender. Consequently, in this section, we use the terms cross-sex and same-sex.