Gender and the love-friendship paradox

pp. 127-146

in: Harry Blatterer, Everyday friendships, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Having surveyed the relationship's institutional deficit and its unsettled position on the boundaries between the private and public spheres, I have in the preceding chapters elaborated what others too have suggested: that of all interpersonal relationships friendship provides us with extensive relational freedom of interaction, with all the generative potential that entails. But I have also intimated that this freedom isn't total, because of friendship's embeddedness in the social order. For example, as I have shown by way of contrast with some anthropological literature, modern friendship has developed as a private and personal relationship. To that extent, friendship's embeddedness in a modern social order is enabling. Private and personal, it is unscripted, contingent on friends' capacities for intimacy, and on their very own practical construction of a specific relationship ethic. But friendship's embeddedness also means that it is constrained. For one, it is semantically "constrained" to the extent that we partake in the collective construction and reconstruction of its meanings. Thus there is the constraint to interact like friends, and not like lovers or parents and children, because there is a cultural understanding — partly contested as we shall see — of what friends typically do or say, or refrain from saying and doing, and how they think about each other.