 communal friendships, 357
agentic friendships, 357 valued social identities, 362 cross-category friendships, 364
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- Unlike family relationships, friendships are voluntary, and the participants generally don’t expect them to be as intimate or long lasting as serious romances and family relationships.
- Depending on the functions being fulfilled, friendships may be primarily communal or agentic.
- The importance we attribute to our friendships changes throughout our lives. Age, culture, gender, and life situations all influence whether friends are our primary source of intimacy.
- While technology allows us to communicate with friends 24/7, our closest friends are often those that we spend time with online and off.
- We have many types of friends, but we often consider a smaller number our close and best friends. The latter are distinguished by providing unwavering identity support for our valued social identities over time.
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Cross-category friendships—like cross-sex, cross-orientation, intercultural, and interethnic—are a powerful way to break down ingrouper and outgrouper perceptions and purge people of negative stereotypes.
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- Across cultures, people agree on friendship rules, the basic principles that underlie the maintenance of successful friendships. Friends who follow these rules are more likely to remain friends than those who don’t.
- Two of the most important maintenance strategies for friends are sharing activities and self-disclosure.
- As in other relationships, friendship betrayal often leads to an overwhelming sense of relationship devaluation and loss. Some friendships can be repaired after a betrayal, but some will end.
- One of the greatest challenges friends face is geographic separation. Communication technologies can help such friends overcome distance by allowing for regular interaction and maintaining a sense of shared interests.
- Some people form sexual relationships with their friends, known as friends-with-benefits, or FWB relationships. Both men and women enter these relationships to satisfy sexual needs. Most of these relationships fail owing to unanticipated emotional challenges.
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