Friendship: Bonds and Binds in a Voluntary Relationship

This paper develops an approach to the understanding of cultural problems in the friendship bond. Utilizing depth interview field data from respondents of both sexes aged eighteen to eighty, plus self-reports of friendship problems by college students and applicable theories of relationship behaviour, two important aspects of friendship culture are probed: (1) the desirable personality traits of friends and the expectation that these will not change; (2) the assumption of an unwritten contract between friends concerning the provision of aid and the repayment of kindnesses. The two major characteristics of the friendship bond that make it both unique in human group life and attractive - freedom and intimacy - also set in motion an internal dialectic which can be the basis of problems between friends or the eventual demise of the relationship. The voluntary aspect of friendship means that it has little of the societal support that other relationships enjoy and that behaviour between friends is freely selected; the intimacy aspect is in direct contradiction to this in that it suggests that the behaviour between friends should fulfil certain expectations which they individually develop. These contradictory pressures also make prior discussion of continuance of attractive traits and expectations almost impossible. Thus, the friendship bond is exceedingly fragile when compared with other, more institutionalized relationships such as marriage. Analytic points for this study are illustrated by descriptions of problematic situations from actual friendships in which the exigencies of life trigger (almost inevitably) the contradictory aspects of the friendship bond.