 communal friendships, 357
agentic friendships, 357 valued social identities, 362 cross-category friendships, 364
You can watch brief, illustrative videos of these terms and test your understanding of the concepts by clicking on the VideoCentral features in the chapter. |
- 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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- Interested in the different functions of friendships? Read about what needs our friendships fulfill on pages 357-358.
- What kind of friend are you? Take the Self-Quiz on page 363 to find out.
- How can you foster intercultural and interethnic friendships? Review pages 365-367 for advice on how to balance the similarities and differences in such friendships.
- What are the rules that can help friendships succeed? Find out on pages 368-370.
- How can you use interpersonal communication to maintain a friendship? Try the Skills Practice on page 370.
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- What can you do to deal with friendship betrayal? Read the suggestions on pages 372-373 and try the Skills Practice on page 373.
- Can a friendship survive geographic separation? Review the suggestions for maintaining long-distance friendships on pages 373-374; then do the Self-Quiz on page 375 and try the Skills Practice on page 376.
- Curious about whether a friendship can survive a romantic entanglement? Learn about attraction between friends on pages 376-377 and 380-381, and then review the suggestions for transitioning from romance back to friendship on page 377.
- What would you do if you had to choose between friends? Complete the Making Relationship Choices exercise on pages 378-379 to find out.
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