6.2: Communication and Friendships

Friendships are voluntary interpersonal relationships between two people who are usually equal and who mutually influence one another. Most people feel the need to feel connected with others. One way we meet our need for connection is through our friendships. Friendship means different things to different people depending on age, gender, and cultural background. Common among all friendships is that they are interpersonal relationships of choice. Throughout your life, you will engage in an ongoing process of developing friendships. Some of your friends may become so close that they are like members of your family.  Other friendships may be more short-term but still important while they last.

Stages in Developing Friendships

According to the Mayo Clinic (2022), adults with strong support provided by good friends have a reduced risk of depression, and older adults with friends are likely to live longer than those without social connections. Friends can increase your sense of belonging and boost your self-confidence. They can help you cope with traumas, such as divorce or serious illness, and enrich your quality of life. However, sometimes it can be difficult to make new friends. Rawlins (1992) suggests that we develop our friendships through a series of six steps. While we may not follow these six steps in the exact order in all of our relationships, these steps help us understand how we develop friendships.

Role-Limited Interaction

The first step in building friendships occurs through Role-Limited Interaction. In this step, we interact with others based on our social roles. For example, when you meet a new person in the class, your interaction centers around your role as a “student.” Communication is characterized by a focus on superficial, rather than personal topics. In this step, we engage in limited self-disclosure and rely on scripts and stereotypes. When two first-time freshmen met in an introductory course, they struck up a conversation and interacted according to the roles they played in the context of their initial communication. They began a conversation because they sit near each other in class and discussed how much they liked or disliked aspects of the course.

Friendly Relations

The second step in developing friendships is called Friendly Relations. This stage is characterized by communication that moves beyond initial roles as the participants begin to interact with one another to see if there are common interests, as well as an interest to continue getting to know one another. As the students spend more time together and have casual conversations, they may realize a wealth of shared interests. They realize that both were traveling from far distances to go to school and understood each other’s struggle with missing their families. Each of them also loves athletics, especially playing basketball. The development of this friendship occurred as they identified with each other as more than classmates. They saw each other as women of the same age, with similar goals, ambitions, and interests. Moreover, as one of them studied Communication and the other Psychology, they appreciated the differences as well as similarities in their collegiate pursuits.

Moving Toward Friendship

The third step in developing friendships is called Moving Toward Friendship. In this stage, participants make moves to foster a more personalized friendship. They may begin meeting outside of the setting in which the relationship started, and begin increasing the levels of self-disclosure. Self-disclosure enables new friends to form bonds of trust. When the students entered this stage it was right before one joined the basketball club on their college campus. As she started practices and meetings, she realized this would be something fun for her and her classmate to do together so she invited her classmate along.

Nascent Friendship

The fourth step in developing friendships is called Nascent Friendship. In this stage, individuals commit to spending more time together. They also may start using the term “friend” to refer to each other as opposed to “a person in my history class” or “this guy I work with.” The interactions extend beyond the initial roles as participants work out their own private communication rules and norms. For example, they may start calling or texting on a regular basis or reserving certain times and activities for each other such as going on evening runs together. As time went on, the students started texting each other more frequently just to tell each other a funny story that happened during the day, to make plans for going out to eat, or to plan for meeting at the gym to work out.

Stabilized Friendship

The fifth step in developing friendships is Stabilized Friendship. In this stage, friends take each other for granted as friends, but not in a negative way. Because the friendship is solid, they assume each other will be in their lives. There is an assumption of continuity. The communication in this stage is also characterized by a sense of trust as levels of self-disclosure increase and each person feels more comfortable revealing parts of him or herself to the other. This stage can continue indefinitely throughout a lifetime. When the women became friends, they were freshmen in college. After finishing school some years later, they moved to separate regions for graduate school. While they were sad to move away from one another, they knew the friendship would continue. To this day they continue to be best friends.

Waning Friendship

The final step in friendship development is Waning Friendship. As you know, friendships do not always have a happy ending. Many friendships come to an end. Friendships may not simply come to an abrupt end. Many times there are stages that show a decline of a friendship, but in Rawlin’s model, the ending of a friendship is summed up by this step. Perhaps the relationship is too difficult to sustain over large geographic distances. Or, sometimes people change and grow in different directions and have little in common with old friends. Sometimes friendship rules are violated to a degree beyond repair. We spoke earlier of trust as a component of friendships. One common rule of trust is that if we tell friends a secret, they are expected to keep it a secret. If that rule is broken, and a friend continually breaks your trust by telling your secrets to others, you are likely to stop thinking of them as your friend.

Challenges for Friendships

While these steps are a general pathway toward friendship, friendships are not always smooth. As with any relationship, challenges exist in friendships that can strain their development. Three of the more common challenges to friendships are gender, cultural diversity, and sexual attraction. Important to remember is that each of these constructs comes with its own conflicts of power and privilege because of the cultural norms and the values we give to certain characteristics. These are challenges to relationships since studies show that people tend to associate with others that are similar to themselves (Echols & Graham, 2013). Take a look at the pair on the side of the page, they identify as different genders, ethnicities, cultures, and are even attracted to different sexes. Their friendship not only offers an opportunity to learn about differences through each other but also offers challenges because of these differences. As we emphasize throughout the book, factors such as our gender identities and cultural backgrounds always play a role in our interactions with others.

Gender

Research suggests that both women and men value trust and intimacy in their friendships and value their time spent with friends (Mathews et al., 2006; Bell & Coleman, 1999; Monsour & Rawlins, 2014). However, there are some differences in the interactions that take place within women’s and men’s friendships (Burleson et al., 2005; Coates, 1986; Harriman, 1985). Quite common among female friends, is to get together simply to talk and catch up with one another. When calling her close friend, Antoinette might say, “Why don’t you come over to my place so we can talk?” The need to connect through verbal communication is explicitly stated and forms the basis for the relationship. In contrast, among male friends, a more common approach to interaction is an invitation to engage in an activity as a means of facilitating the conversation. For example, John might say to his friend, “Hey, Mike, let’s play video games this weekend.” The explicit request is to engage in an activity, but John and Mike understand that as they engage in the activity, they will talk, joke around, and reinforce their friendship ties. While we have often looked at gender as male and female, culture is changing in that gender is now often viewed as a spectrum rather than the male/female binary. Research is now being done to be more inclusive of gender definitions that extend beyond the male/female binary. This research may be cutting edge in its field, but as society becomes more accepting of difference, new ideas of relationship rules will emerge.

Culture

Cultural values shape how we understand our friendships. Most Western societies emphasize individualism (as opposed to collectivism); thus friendships are seen as voluntary in that we get to choose whom we want in our friendship circle. If we do not like someone we do not have to be friends with him or her in personal life. This is in contrast to the workplace, or school, where we may be forced to get along with colleagues or classmates even though we may not like them. In many collectivist cultures, such as Japan and China, friendships carry certain obligations that are understood by all parties (Carrier, 1999; Kim & Markman, 2013). These may include gift-giving, employment, and economic opportunities Although these sorts of connections, particularly in business and politics, may be frowned upon in the United States because they contradict the cultural value of individualism, they are natural, normal, and logical results of friendships in collectivist cultures.

Sexual Attraction

The classic film, When Harry Met Sally, highlights how sexual attraction can complicate friendships. In the movie, Harry quotes the line, “Men and women can’t be friends because the sex always gets in the way.” Levels of sexual attraction or sexual tension may challenge friendships between heterosexual men and women, gay men, and lesbian women. This may arise from an internal desire of one of the friends to explore a sexual relationship, or if someone in the relationship indicates that he/she wants to be “more than friends.” These situations might place strain on the friendship and require the individuals to address the situation if they want the friendship to continue. One approach has been the recent definition of friendships called, “Friends with Benefits.” This term implies an understanding that two people will identify their relationship as a friendship, but will be open to engaging in sexual activity without committing to the other characteristics common in romantic relationships.

References

Bell, S., & Coleman, S. (1999). The anthropology of friendship: Enduring themes and future possibilities. The Anthropology of Friendship. Berg.

Burleson, B. R., Holmstrom, A. J., & Jones, S. M. (2005). Some consequences for helpers who deliver ‘cold comfort’: Why it’s worse for women than men to be inept when providing emotional support. Sex Roles, 53(3/4), 153-172.

Carrier, J. G. (1999). People who can be friends: Selves and social relationships. In Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman (Eds), The Anthropology of Friendship (pp. 21-28). Berg.

Coates, J. (2986). Women, men, and language: A sociolinguistic account of sex differences in language. Longman.

Echols, L., & Graham, S. (2013). Birds of a different feather: How do cross-ethnic friends flock together? Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 59(4), 461-488.

Harriman, A. (1985). Women/men/management. Praeger.

Kim, K., & Markman, A. (2013). Individual differences, cultural differences, and dialectic conflict description and resolution. International Journal of Psychology, 48(5), 797-808.

Mayo Clinic Staff. (2022). Friendships: Enrich your life and improve your health.

Matthews, A., Derlega, V. J., & Morrow. J. (2006). What is highly personal information and how is it related to self-disclosure decision-making? The perspective of college students. Communication Research Reports, 23(2), 85-92.

Monsour, M., & Rawlins, W. K. (2014). Transitional identities and postmodern cross-gender friendships: An exploratory investigation. Women & Language, 37(1), 11-39.

Rawlins, W. K. (1992). Friendship Matters: Communication, Dialectics, and the Life Course. Routledge.