Friendship

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the process through which a typical friendship is developed and maintained, 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 using examples from the movies "Steel Magnolias" and "City Slickers". This paper incorporates a theoretical model developed by Long and Wood as well as drawing upon the writer's personal experience and popular notions of friendship.

From the Paper:

"Many of us would like to think that someone deep down inside of us is our own true self, a person who never compromises or is compromised, an independent person who makes up her own mind, who is never subject to peer pressure or societal influences, a person who stays the same through thick and thin, who endures over time and through all challenges.
But while such an image of a pure, unchanging and incorruptible self is appealing (and has its roots in the Romanticism of the 19th century, which taught that we should believe in the innate goodness of all people, a reverence for individuality, and in the primacy of the connection between the pure human heart and the state of nature), it is in fact not an accurate one. In fact, while our sense of self is dependent on some internal factors, such as our genetic heritage and our physical state of well-being, most of our sense of who we are is derived from the people with whom we interact, and especially our family and friends. We are not in fact always the same person: We differ from one situation to the next and certainly from one year (or decade) to the next."

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