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Friendship

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As individuals grow and interact with people outside their families, they establish new, nonfamily relationships. Friendship is a close and caring relationship between two people that is perceived as mutually satisfying and beneficial. Friendship benefits include emotional support, companionship, and help coping with major life stressors (Rawlins, 1992, 2008). Children who form successful friendships with others perform better academically and demonstrate fewer aggressive tendencies than those who do not (Doll, 1996; Hartup & Stevens, 1997; Newcomb & Bagwell, 1995; Rawlins, 1994; Weisz & Wood, 2005). And secure, stable friendships and family relationships serve to enhance children’s ability to process communication behaviors (Dwyer et al., 2010).

Although everyone has a personal opinion as to what qualities a friend should possess, research finds agreement on six important characteristics of friendship (Pearson & Spitzberg, 1990):

Availability: making time for one another
Caring: feelings of concern for the happiness and well-being of each other
Honesty: being open and truthful with each other, even if that means saying things that are hard to hear (Shuangyue & Merolla, 2006)
Trust: being honest and maintaining confidentiality
Loyalty: maintaining relationships despite disagreements and framing differences as positives (Baxter, Foley, & Thatcher, 2008)
Empathy: communicating the ability to feel what each other is feeling and experiencing

The extent to which you and your friend share these characteristics helps build the relational context of your relationship, as you learned in chapter 1. The amount of trust, loyalty, honesty, and other characteristics that you experience together affects you as you construct and decode messages.