Friendship

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the bonds of friendship are formed, looking particularly at the ways in which interactions with other people help to mold our sense of self and how interpersonal communication is the bedrock of friendship. It uses a model of the development of friendship (and the subsequent development of sense of self that any serious and/or long-term friendship entails) developed by L. Long and J. Wood to demonstrate how deeply interactive a process the relationship of friendship is. Using the friendship between the author's mother and her friend, it describes the six stages of friendship that Young and Wood describe as being typical of an evolving friendship. It then connects these at each step to the stage of friendship that actually occurred between and linking these descriptions to other theoretical models of the interactionist model of relational communication.

From the Paper:

"The first phase of friendship (these phases are arranged chronologically) is a "role-limited interaction" that "includes early interactions that tend to follow standard roles and rules" (long and Wood, 2000, p. 181). In other words, during this phase of friendship, while we are interested in forming more intimate and particularistic bonds with someone, we tend to act as someone in our role is expected to. In other words, the opening phase of a friendship is marked by an adherence to socially and culturally defined norms that we bring to the relationship, norms that we have already incorporated into our sense of self through previous interactions with other individuals (primarily the family if we are young and other friends and colleagues if we are older) and social institutions (Bell and Coleman, 1999, p. 23)."

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