Abstract
Friendship arguably offers itself as the freest of all human associations. A weakness of cultural prescription opens a terrain in which intimacy can be lived in a trust relationship that personifies equality, justice and respect. Friendship’s ‘relational freedom’ enables the mutual development of selves; it is generative. Therein lies ‘the beauty of friendship’, as Agnes Heller has reminded us. But the freedom of intimacy is limited. Embedded in a society that attributes different repertoires of intimacy to women and men and privileges male homosociality, friendship’s freedom is curtailed. Especially cross-sex friendships continue to show evidence of persisting tensions. ‘Erotic friendships’ that seek to realize sexual intimacy but eschew the commitments of coupledom continue to face normative-practical challenges. In this paper, I view central aspects of heterosexual intimacy through the small world of intimate friendship, a prism that refracts gendered tensions in the world at large.
Keywords
We live in a world in which intimate life seems thoroughly detached from institutional moorings; anything it seems is possible. Sexualities, lifestyles and identities appear to be merely a matter of individual proclivity and choice. Commitment is optional. The last vestiges of convention seem finally overcome and freedom realized. The rest, it seems, is personal business. And so it is. But to say that personal life is merely personal business is to underestimate the fact of human culture: the constant building, tearing down and rebuilding of collective structures of meaning that, despite their plurality and fragmentation, promise a foothold in a world whose complexities outstrip individual sense-making capacities. According to Heller and Fehér it is up to us to embrace a historically unprecedented openness of life’s possibilities, to turn ‘the fate of contingency into destiny’ (1988: 19). That call may spell freedom, but it also conjures anxieties well articulated by Zygmunt Bauman:
The anxiety would be lessened, tensions allayed, the total situation made more comfortable were the stunning profusion of possibilities somewhat reduced; were the world a bit more regular, its occurrences more repetitive, its parts better marked and separated; in other words – were the events of the world more predictable, and the utility or uselessness of things more immediately evident. (1995: 145)
One way by which we attempt to reduce those tensions and anxieties is to find anchorage in tradition – in the ‘illusion of permanence’ as Woody Allen has called it. There we look for recipes for living and strive to wrest that which may still be useful from the past so that it may give comfort, direction, certainty in the present. The more inadequate its conventions, the more convention beckons for restitution. Intimate relationships are not exempt from those dynamics. Far from a radical demise of tradition, the constant tension between the old and the new – whereby ‘the old’ appears to be ever younger – is the condition of modernity, and so the contemporary condition of love and friendship, of intimacy.
I’d like to descend closer to the gritty grounds of modern culture and hope to give flesh to private and personal aspects of modernity as experience, here and now, in the everyday. I’ll begin by discussing the words ‘friends’ and ‘friendship’, elaborate the freedom the relationship affords us to create it in terms of its own internal dynamism, and briefly speak about friendship’s potential for the development of selves. I then take to the limits of friendship’s freedom, limits that are due to its embeddedness in the contemporary gender order. I hope to show that the small world of friendship – relations between two individuals who care for and respect one another – refracts social realities in the world at large; and that the gendered limits to friendship’s freedom speak to persisting inequalities that, far from being lodged only in public structures of opportunity, continue to pervade intimate life.
I use key terms of this paper – friendship, love, intimacy – in particular ways: I refer to friendship as an intimate relationship; I use ‘intimacy’ to not simply describe a set of feelings, but a non-instrumental relationship of trust based on affection, care and respect; when I say ‘love’, I mean to address ‘ordinary coupledom’ and the cultural artefacts that are its frame of reference. The extraordinariness of ordinary culture, like the extraordinariness of ordinary coupledom, lies in the fact that we collectively, over time, change its orientating power. I limit myself to heterosexuality; I bracket class, age, cultural background and alternative gender identities to critique – from the inside out – assumptions that circulate in that amorphous entity we call ‘the mainstream’.
The semantics of friendship
The social media age has prompted a new public reflexivity about friendship. The ease with which we can accumulate great numbers of Facebook friends has not only spawned the verb construction ‘to friend’ and neologisms such as ‘defriending’, ‘unfriending’, and ‘friend farming’, but has sparked curiosity and sometimes consternation about what friendship is, who our real friends are and who our ‘frenemies’. It has raised questions as to whether this age of ubiquitous but loose connections is not also an age that no longer prizes friendship the way we may have before the advent of social media. A gap seems to have opened up between our technological capacities to connect with others and the social conventions that orient the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of these relationships. Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman (2012) addresses a common contemporary conundrum:
There are Facebook friends with whom you want to share everything, those you’ve grown apart from, and those you’ve barely heard of. (You can assign them to different lists, but then you’ve introduced a whole new layer of decisions: who belongs where? What qualifies someone to be switched from one list to another? And so on.) There are Twitter followers with whom your acquaintance is strictly professional, those you know from school, but didn’t necessarily like, and those who are your dad. Not long ago, I realised with a feeling of dismay that I’d started to think of some of these contacts – not most of them, but some – as clutter.
Under the conditions of a social media society the terms ‘friends’ and ‘friendship’ have become especially ambiguous. But to say that there has been a new reflexivity about friendship is not to say that the terminological uncertainties are new. Linguists, for example, have pointed out that in English language usage, at least since the time of Shakespeare, the term ‘friend’ has lost emotional depth, and so has become ever more inclusive, while ‘friendship’ has by and large continued to connote an intimate relationship (Wierzbicka, 1997: 35–54).
An essay on friendship by the self-professed ‘philosopher of culture, … sociologist … and poet’ (Koch, 2000: 3) Siegfried Kracauer begins as follows: ‘There are words that walk the centuries by word of mouth, without their conceptual content ever appearing clearly and sharply defined before the inner eye.’ Like ‘love, loyalty, courage, cowardice, hate, compassion, pride’, friendship too, he says, exhibits ‘untameable fullness in the paltry form of a word’ (1990: 9, 11, my translation). Here is the legacy of Fritz Mauthner, and of Ludwig Wittgenstein: the suspicion that words, concepts are only ever inadequate; that they cannot contain and cannot do justice to the ‘untameable fullness’ of life, to the banal and extraordinary moments, that series of presents from which we reflect on the past and have to face a contingent future. Friendship is one of those words because it cannot, for Kracauer, adequately describe the promise it contains: to give us a sense of home in modernity’s alienating drift. But the inadequacy of the word to designate its promise does not prevent him from investigating the shared, cultural meaning of friendship.
His approach is to differentiate friendship from friendly relations, friends from comrades, colleagues and acquaintances. Comrades are tied together by an external purpose, colleagues, similarly, by a common task. My collegial relationships end, Kracauer writes, ‘[w]here the world of my dreams, my memories, my yearning, my love begins’ (1990: 19, my translation). His distinction between friends and acquaintances is doubtless indebted to Georg Simmel who reminds us that ‘[in] the very assertion that one is acquainted with a given person … one indicates very distinctly the absence of really intimate relationships’ (1906: 452). All these relationships can develop into friendship, which Kracauer finally describes as a ‘dispositional and ideal community of free, independent persons based on the mutual development of typical possibilities’; its secret, born of its intimacy, is the potential ‘to flourish together without losing oneself in the other, to devote oneself in order to possess oneself in expanded form’ (1990: 54, my translation). The way the term ‘friend’ is used today, then, is to make intimacy an optional characteristic. In order to name friends that interact in friendship – that is, in an intimate relationship – we have to introduce ‘close’ or ‘best’ or ‘true’ to make distinctions.
In the sociological literature the differentiating approach exemplified by Kracauer’s and Simmel’s work is usually no longer pursued. ‘Friend’ and ‘friendship’ are conflated, notwithstanding periodic calls not to conflate the weak ties of friendly relations with the strong ties of friendship (Fischer, 1982; Kurth, 1970). That conflation has methodological implications. Firstly, to simply mirror the linguistic capacity of the word ‘friend’ to encompass a range of non-intimates ignores that no matter what people use as a shorthand, they do retain the capacity to distinguish the close from the not so close and even barely known others in their lives. Idiomatic usage of ‘friend’ for sundry relationships may well follow an Anglophone trend: it has come to be considered bad form, or at least odd, to use the term ‘acquaintance’ when introducing someone – people, it seems, like to be known to be liked. Secondly, using ‘friendship’ as if it reflects the inclusivity of ‘friend’ can give the impression that strong ties of friendship are everywhere, and we can then revel in the ‘hidden solidarities’ that are said to suffuse modern life (Spencer and Pahl, 2006). Thirdly, and conversely, by conflating the inclusive meaning of ‘friend’ with the more exclusive meaning of ‘friendship’ we can also argue that friendship is nearing its end by way of imposing the affective weakness of ‘friend’ on ‘friendship’. In other words, semantic conflation allows us to mount a whole range of arguments on the fulcrum of a word turned into sinkhole concept.
Friendship also functions as a metaphor. There is semantic cross-fertilization between ‘family’ and ‘friends’. Sometimes men call their best mates ‘bro’; and the emergence of the ‘bromance’ further illustrates that sense of family as intimacy. Reference to familial bonds connotes a type of closeness, based on the notion that ‘blood is thicker than water’; it signals intimacy, because ‘friend’ as commonly used no longer suffices, and it does so irrespective of the fact that actual family life can be far from ideal (Spencer and Pahl, 2006). Another example is the concept of ‘families of choice’ used to describe voluntary, non-heterosexual communities that are underpinned by a ‘friendship ethic’ (Weeks et al., 2001: 51–76). Quite another case is the role the semantics of friendship play in erotic love where friendship, not family, figures as a metaphor for intimacy. (You might say ‘my partner is my best friend’, but you are not likely to say, ‘my partner is my brother/sister’.) I’ll explore that development later, when I touch on some of the social processes that have moved friendship to the centre of the love relationship.
Friendship’s relational freedom
From the 20th century onwards, love was folded into the nexus capitalism–romance– therapy. The culture of romance – with its Valentine’s cards and anniversaries, white weddings, honeymoon vacations and candle-lit dinners, but also expert counselling and everyday therapeutics (e.g. the self-help genre) – continues to strongly outline love’s terrain, sets its boundaries, provides benchmarks with which to test its truths and lies, celebrates its beauties and suggests exits from its pains. In marriage or cohabitation, love is subject to legal regimes, to rights and obligations that can be called upon to give it contractual anchorage, but also to give legal purchase to its demise. Love is shot through with prescriptions: monogamy, and so exclusivity, is normative. While this does not prevent people from asserting their own desires and alternative practices – think about open or polyamorous relationships – love is at essence based on the non-substitutability of the loved other whose ‘specialness’ is secured by the injunction of exclusivity. Alternative arrangements have to justify themselves against the monogamous norm.
Consider also that in love ‘the relationship’ has come to figure as a quasi-third entity between lovers – to be worked on, to be sustained, to be rescued by those who specialize in its salvage and resuscitation. Love, in other words, is subject to a strong structural and cultural program. Whatever the changes, the alternatives and subversions, the cultural bedrock of love, porous though it may be, continues to orient the public imagination and therefore the routine grounds of ordinary coupledom.
Any of this is only to a limited extent the case for friendship. The lack of formalization is self-evident; there are no written contracts that spell out the rights and obligations of friends; neither can sue the other for a breach of terms, nor can friends claim state support or seek help in ‘friendship counselling’. Indeed, if friends were to arrive at a point where the relationship is deemed to be in need of expert advice the friendship is arguably either beyond repair, or the need for expert guidance itself is an indication that friendship has, by that logic, transformed into ‘love’ as described in the culture. This does not mean that friendship is free of shared meaning, however. Were this to be the case it simply wouldn’t make sense to us, would remain unrecognizable as a social relationship. Think about trust and loyalty, equality, reciprocity and justice. In friendship these are not merely norms but they are also more than prerequisites. Friendship is a type of practice. Where there is no trust there is no friendship. Friendship is just. And because it is just, ‘when people are friends’, writes Aristotle, ‘they have no need of justice’ (2012: 164). Ordinary coupledom, on the other hand, can, and often does, continue whether trusting or not. Love does not have to be just in order to go by its name.
The limits of cultural prescription, the irreducibility of trust, equality and justice, and the non-objectification of friendship as a relationship, constitute the horizon of friendship’s freedom. As a practical consequence of that relational freedom friends are free to construct the relationship in unmediated ‘I and thou’ relations. Allan Silver goes so far as to call friendship ‘an ideal arena for that individualized conception of personal agency central to modern notions of freedom’ (1996: 47). That is – emphatically – not to say that it can’t be thus in love. But it is to point out that the same kind of relational freedom is not a given in ordinary coupledom, but needs to be attained against, or even despite of, an ever-available love ideology (see Swidler, 2001). Concerning friendship, that given freedom is, in turn, generative; it generates possibilities for changes of self.
Friendship’s generativity
Kracauer’s writing on friendship has been considered part of his attempt to describe a modern world in which communal ideals of humanity are lost and can only partly be recouped in private and personal relationships (Frisby, 1986: 114–15). With increased anonymity, isolation and loneliness arise needs for connection that friendship can fulfil because, as Kracauer writes, ‘we want to have a home and be home to another’ (Kracauer, 1990: 66). On that view, friendship helps us deal with what the first generation of critical theorists regarded central to the experience of modernity: our existential homelessness in a modernity bereft of meaning. For Kracauer that homelessness spells a fragmented self that yearns for coherence.
But how do we reconcile the need for a ‘home’, for a coherent self, with the freedom friendship offers? There is a clue in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. For him that reconciliation is in fact possible in relations of intimacy:
Here we are not one-sidedly within ourselves, but willingly limit ourselves with reference to an other, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves. In this determinacy, the human being should not feel determined; on the contrary, he attains his self-awareness only by regarding the other as other. (1991: 42)
Freely interpreted, and coaxed into the present, the fact of our human interdependence, our irreducible sociality, contains the very potentiality for our freedom, and nowhere more so than in our freely chosen personal relationships, in relationships where we can be ourselves. Contrary to a tendency, then, to value freedom as independence, here it is interdependence as the freedom to be yourself with another that adds concrete meaning to Heller’s ‘beauty of friendship’, a beauty she describes as mutual abandonment: ‘… I abandon myself in freedom; I abandon myself to a person whose friendship I possess, as he abandons himself to me, whose friendship he possesses’ (1998: 11).
Because with intimate friends we can be ourselves in a relationship of mutual respect, care and affection, we can, as Emerson said, ‘think aloud’ in their company. With them, we are not tied to the conventions of public propriety; friendship’s virtue lies in the fact that we can be what, by standards of common decency, but even against our own better judgment, may well be considered indecent: here the feminist may, for a time, be sexist, the leftist conservative, the tolerant intolerant, the open-hearted mean-spirited. Friends will make these allowances because they recognize one another’s human fallibility, their humanity. In this intimate relationship, trust mitigates the risk that comes with the necessary vulnerability that an open heart requires; trust, but also respect, care and affection, counter the fear of humiliation, shame or embarrassment.
But generativity denotes more than the freedom to be ourselves together; it is about the potentiality of becoming together, of growing, of developing, because friends may see in us possibilities to which we ourselves might be blind. Far from being merely based on similarity, it is their difference – their biographies, their interests, their attitudes – that holds the potential to set us off on new paths. The self in friendship is open to change because friends are ‘characteristically and distinctively receptive to being directed and interpreted and so in these ways drawn [like a portrait] by the other’ (Cocking and Kennett, 1998: 503). There is more to say about friendship’s generativity that cannot be said in this context (see Blatterer, 2015: 103–17). I leave this section with an illustrative excerpt from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn:
Hamilton opened my eyes and gave me new values … I could never again see the world, or my friends, as I had seen them prior to his coming. Hamilton altered me profoundly, as only a rare book, a rare personality, a rare experience can alter one. For the first time in my life I understood what it was to experience a vital friendship and yet not feel enslaved or attached by the experience.… Hamilton was friendship itself, rather than a friend. (1984: 149–50)
Freedom’s gendered limits: Masculinity and cross-sex friendship
From friendship’s freedom to freedom’s limits. Like all social relationships friendship is lived in society. Its freedom is an embedded freedom. That embeddedness draws limits to freedom’s practical horizon. To illustrate this I draw on friendship’s embeddedness in the contemporary gender system. For, however pluralized the cultural and social environments we traverse, the contexts in which we make our lives, however hopelessly fragmented society may appear, gender is everywhere. Its arbitrary distinctions pervade all spheres of life, penetrate to the heart of intimacy and cannot but constitute our relations to self and to others, to strangers as well as friends. We cannot hope to understand the distinguishing and often disrespectful dynamics of gender relations if we do not confront our own prejudices; prejudices that are difficult to confront because they are deeply etched in our bodies. Especially heterosexual masculinities and male homosociality continue to be blind-spots on both the public and the personal level, irrespective of discussions about labour market opportunities, the gender pay gap, the division of labour in the home, sexual and domestic violence, mental health, issues around pornography, and so forth.
Two beer commercials screened on Australian TV illustrate the cultural valorization of male homosociality. The commercials depict a heterosexual couple on holidays and are themed around the ‘coincidental’ – but obviously planned – ‘intrusion’ of the male protagonist’s ‘mates’ on the couple’s holidays. In one of these the couple lounges at a pool. One of the male protagonist’s friends, accompanied by his female partner, walks into the scene. The men fake utter though pleasant surprise when yet another ‘mate’ appears in the pool – and upon seeing his friends duly drops his female companion into the water. Then, to Jackson Browne’s version of Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer), the men happily saunter off together to enjoy their beers with each other. The women are left behind.
The message is fairly straightforward: real men prefer to hang out with each other rather than with women or, in any case, need time out from women. Now, we don’t have much evidence about how that type of media representation of gendered interaction is actually perceived. A study with young New Zealanders suggests, however, that men tend to write similar representations off as funny but divorced from reality, whereas young women are more likely to recognize real, experienced gender relations in the content (Abel, 2012: 160–77). We could play a thought-experiment and replace the women with other social categories, based on ethnicity for example. And we could then assume that a majority of viewers would, at the very least, not see the joke; there might even be public outrage. Gendered stereotyping rarely causes public protest. And it barely raises eyebrows because we privilege male homosociality – social activities exclusively amongst men – almost as a matter of course.
Both gender stereotyping and male homosociality can give us some clues about the cultural barriers to intimate friendships between women and men. There is a branch of research in social psychology that is concerned with automatic stereotyping, with intuitive, knee-jerk reactions that people have when they are asked to make connections between social types and labels under time pressure. For example, one study presented participants with a list of typical male and female names – Jane and John, for instance – and with a list of professions. The majority of participants would assign Jane the role of nurse, and John the role of doctor (Banaji and Hardin, 1996). These knee-jerk assignments of professional roles according to gender stereotypes speak to the power and internalized depth of cultural schemes that orientate our deep-seated assumptions.
Along similar lines I suggest that we can assume the following: when people are asked to assign either ‘love’ or ‘friendship’ to stereotypical images of men and women arranged in pairs, they are likely to intuitively assign homosocial pairs (male/male or female/female) to the category ‘friendship’, and heterosocial pairs (female/male) to the category ‘love’. And we can at least hypothesize that participants would do so because they would in the first instance, and absent any other information, draw on a cultural scheme that goes something like this: in ‘love’ heterosociality is normative while homosociality is nonstandard; in friendship homosociality is normative while heterosociality is nonstandard. I call this scheme the ‘love-friendship paradox’ (Blatterer, 2015: 127–146). It is paradoxical because at the same time friendship is supposed to underpin love relationships.
For that scheme to be rendered invalid additional information needs to be available. We can think of significant age differences here, or non-heterosexual spaces, or other stereotypes that assign ‘butch’ or ‘camp’ or ‘effeminate’ traits to others. But additional information absent, we will prioritize and most likely will intuitively assume ‘friendship’ to be homosocial, love to be heterosocial, and in so prioritizing order the interactions according to stereotypes. Reproducing what is (hetero)normative, the process points to cultural barriers to be overcome in the formation and maintenance of friendships between women and men.
Cross-sex friendships
The historian Cassandra Good (2012) has investigated cross-sex friendship in the early American Republic. In her analysis she turns to the relationship between the wife of John Adams, Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. That was a time when the possibilities of personal interaction between men and women were severely curtailed. Then as now there were no cultural scripts for these relationships; neither etiquette books nor novels thematized them, and then there were fears that these relationships were little more than male ruses to seduce women. Abigail and Thomas, following the conventions of the day, embedded friendship in social environments, such as literary salons, where heterosociality was accepted; they would refer to each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and so draw on the semantics of accepted familial intimacy; they ‘triangulated’ their friendship by including their spouses in interactions (see also Sedgwick, 1985). Husbands, after all, had the power to determine their wives’ social activities. Social embedding helped make their relationship credible by putting its propriety beyond doubt.
Important aspects of contemporary cross-sex friendship are different, mainly due to the demise of that kind of patriarchal power, and the much greater freedom women and men have to interact. But despite these structural opportunities for interaction there is no equally significant transformation on the level of cultural norms. While the lack of cultural prescription of friendship is central to its relational freedom, something decisive happens when we throw gender into the mix: in the face of public uncertainties about cross-sex friendship the space of freedom is filled by frames of reference that are available; and these hang on the assumption that in cross-sex interactions sexual attraction is normative. Movies depicting these relationships invariably resolve them in romantic love (When Harry met Sally, but also Friends with Benefits are examples). Vis-à-vis third others – partners, parents, friends – there is a burden of justification, because they may just want to know ‘what’s really going on’. And sometimes when one of the friends enters a serious relationship with someone else the friendship falters because the expectation of sexual attraction may pose a threat.
We can add a further dimension: we attribute different kinds of intimacy to men and women. It’s explicit in the notion that in friendship men stand shoulder to shoulder, and women face to face; or that heterosexual male intimacy is about common interests rather than matters of the heart, while women’s friendships are about emotional connection. That the twain shall only rarely meet is assured by ideal models of masculinity – what Connell (2005) has called ‘hegemonic’ masculinities – that must in order to shore themselves up repudiate anything that hints at femininity. We learn from a young age to erase those gestures, vocal inflections, interests, appearances and emotional repertoires that could raise the suspicion of femininity. Homophobia, then, is not simply a prejudice against men who are ‘homosexual’, but a prejudice against femininity in men that gains sustenance in the devaluation of those who are supposed to embody the feminine ideal: women (Kimmel, 2004). On a less dramatic but no less significant level the mere fact that some men feel the need to refer to their ‘feminine’ side when talking about activities of care, nurturance and support, and so actually reiterate their essential manliness, shows how deep the gendered division of intimacy runs even in those who think of themselves as progressive.
The gendered division of intimacy is evident in research that seeks to identify the benefits. There is a consensus that men gain emotional support that they are often not able to elicit from their male friends. But men also tend to overestimate the closeness of the relationship; women tend to feel closer to their women friends. While men reap emotional benefits women tend to perceive benefits of another kind, such as a feeling of physical safety. But men also hold their women friends to higher relational standards than their male friends; if women cancel plans, men often judge them more harshly than other men (Buhrke and Fuqua, 1987; Felmlee, 1999; Felmlee et al., 2012; Fuhrman et al., 2009; Rose, 1985; Rubin, 1985). Note that even in so-called ‘intersectional friendships’ between straights and non-heterosexuals, the emotional benefits to men outweigh the emotional benefits to women (Muraco, 2012). These conclusions speak to the cultural structuring of gendered intimacies.
The gendered discrepancies in estimations of relationship depth have been situated in different conceptions of self. Research has shown that women’s sense of self is highly contingent on their sense of relatedness to others to the extent that their sense of independence is correlated to their sense of situatedness in a web of social relationships. Independence and interdependence are not strictly separated. Men, on the other hand, tend to stress independence and conceive of it in rather individualistic terms (Cross and Madson, 1997). These are fundamentally different notions of freedom: one recognizes the generative potentials that reside in interdependence, in relationships; the other perceives of the need to defend freedom as total independence. The first variant recognizes the fact of our interdependencies; the second clamours for the realization of a fiction: that freedom lies in solitude, and in episodic adventures to break its boredoms. We are, then, dealing here with two concepts of freedom – one male and restrictive, the other female and inclusive – which connect seamlessly to one type of intimacy that is built on stoicism and truncated expressive repertoires and another built on care and emotional expressivity. That this is no trifling matter is evident in research showing that men are more likely to be lonely than women (Flood, 2005). The individualistic fiction of freedom as total independence ultimately spells the terrible freedom of loneliness.
The love-friendship paradox works as a scheme by which people ‘develop a generalized readiness to encode all cross-sex interaction in sexual terms and all members of the opposite sex in terms of sexual attractions’ (Bern cited in O’Meara, 1989: 529). That research suggests that heterosexual men are more likely to be sexually attracted to their women friends than women are to them, irrespective of the men’s or their female friends’ relationship status (Halatsis and Christakis, 2009). Owing to the truncated expressiveness in the masculine ideal, men are more likely than women ‘to misconstrue their cross-sex friends’ freer expression of intimacy as indication of sexual attraction’ (2009: 932). Both, however, may just as well see sex as a threat to friendship. They fear its inclusion migrates the relationship into the terrain of ordinary coupledom, which, according to some research participants, ‘entails commitment, exclusivity, and possessiveness that do no befit a friendship’ (2009: 933). Does this mean that friendship cannot accommodate sex? According to Donald O’Meara (1989: 526), who defines cross-sex friendship as non-romantic but not necessarily non-sexual, it can. And indeed, because we can never discount individual ingenuity, the answer must be a resounding ‘yes, of course!’ I suggest we call such relationships ‘erotic friendships’.
Erotic friendships
In fact, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera devises a relationship he calls ‘erotic friendship’. ‘Tomas’, writes Kundera,
would tell his mistresses: the only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other. To ensure that erotic friendship never grew into the aggression of love, he would meet each of his long-term mistresses only at intervals. He considered this method flawless and propagated it among his friends: ‘The important thing is to abide by the rules of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.’ (1984: 11)
The contemporary label for these relationships is ‘friends with benefits’. Once we take intimacy as a benchmark to these relationships, we can see their strategic logic, the lack of an intimate centre. This is obvious in Kundera’s fictional account. But it is also obvious in everyday attempts to bed down the relationship category by setting out rules. Here are some ‘friends with benefits’ rules offered in a blog:
Rule 1: Don’t hang out with her.… Take the ‘friend’ part of that phrase lightly. Rule 3: Limit your time to less than 2 hours. Rule 7: Don’t do pillow talk. If you want to remain friends with benefits, and nothing more, don’t reveal your dreams and ambitions after you get laid. Rule 10: Run at the first talk of becoming more than friends with benefits. (Hartley, 2010)
Clearly we are not dealing with friendship in the intimate sense here. When they are reduced to episodic ‘hook ups’, these relationships are instrumental, are mainly geared to the fulfilment of sexual needs and therefore need not involve the mutual trust, care and respect we can expect from friendship. People are of course free to engage in whatever relationships that suit them; and we might even argue that the friends with benefits phenomenon indicates a democratization of sexual life: now women too can engage in sex for its own sake. That this is by no means taken for granted is evident in publications such as Hardy and Easton’s Ethical Slut (1997) that seek to defend women’s right to ‘positive’ expressions of sexual need. No such ethical blueprints need be extended to men. But we might just as well see in those trends an avenue by which to realize the restricted freedom that has been assigned to men’s self-perception, because it actualizes independence from others as well as disconnection depending on what needs arise at a given moment. Connectivity rather than connection seems to permit for the strategic consumption of sexual needs (Markus, 2010a). Hearts can remain safely closed, emotional vulnerabilities do not have to be negotiated, restrictive freedom is generalized and gains purchase in the promise to depersonalize the most personal of interactions.
How can we rescue erotic friendship from Kundera’s pen? I suggest we use the term to denote only those friendships that aim at intimacy sans the commitments, mutual projects, and constraints that ordinary coupledom may signify. Here the division of sexual love and platonic friendship dissolves, and at first blush we might think this is enabled by the fact that today sex is easily divorced from intimacy. The struggle over meaning in love, and the struggle over meaning in friendships between men and women, is the struggle over how to place sex when there is a cultural scheme that at once ‘orientates’ but is at the same time inadequate to encompass the range of intimate possibilities erotic friendship may provide.
But there is another issue. From the 20th century recreational sex gradually separated from intimacy as sex for its own sake. That separation of sex from intimacy in practice goes hand in hand with a much longer historical process by which intimacy as an idea is reduced to sex. That reduction is, for instance, apparent when researchers who investigate heterosexual, male friendships have to reassure their respondents that their research is not about homosexuality (e.g. Miller, 1992). In ordinary coupledom, sexual intimacy then becomes intimacy per se, a ‘good sex life’ the bellwether of the good relationship.
But here sex alone cannot live up to needs for intimacy, to what Markus (2010b: 11) calls ‘shared solitude’ on the basis of mutual trust, reciprocity, and respect. And so, in ordinary coupledom the word ‘friend’ has metaphorical purchase because it holds connotations of intimacy. Being trust, being equality, justice and respect, friendship signals a kind of intimacy that sex alone cannot bring, and that what goes by the name of ‘love’ often fails to deliver. In this case, friendship plays a subsidiary role; it is called upon to shore up sexual love, the normative form of heterosociality, and to make up for an intimate insufficiency. It is because of that insufficiency, I think, that lovers can be friends – while ordinary coupledom and friendship remain two different types of relationship.
The issue with love, then, is not whether or not individual relationships can be fulfilling. Just as there are fulfilling cross-sex friendships there are fulfilling, generative, love relationships. We cannot account for the specificity – the ingenuity, creativity and loving capacities – of single individuals. The problem is thus not with love as a set of emotions, but with how that set of emotions has been culturally framed as romance, the expectations with which it is loaded, and the realities its ideology may hide. Mary Evans comes to the point: ‘To be “romantic” has always been associated with turning away from reality. In relations between men and women our apparently overwhelming need for romance would sometimes suggest that the reality of these relations is too awful to be allowed’ (2003: 18).
What might Evans mean by ‘the reality’ of love, by that which romance promises to overcome or at least help us forget for a while? Perhaps this: that loving coupledom is about the mundane, routine interactions of everyday life; that love is about the shared doing of housework and childcare, the shared organization of leisure pursuits and social events, about half the care of the other; and about doing this with a full, respectful orientation to the other not as a limiting object to one’s freedom but as the seat of freedom itself. Love is a shared project. Love is about the shared engagement in the banal necessities of life as well as the extraordinary moments in the shelter of intimacy. And it is lived like that by many, we can be sure. But for it to become a reality on a massive scale gender relations would have to be dramatically different, and that would, among other things, necessitate a social redefinition of masculinity, a further breaking open of narrow models. The issue with love, then, is not its individual unworkability or successes, but the cultural frame as well as the structural opportunities against which intimacy needs to be constructed.
Psychologically, emotionally, materially, there is simply less at stake in friendship than in love. For couples, friendships with others can have an alleviating function, because it opens love out to the world. But friendship can play that role because it is comparatively obligation free. It is rarely if ever a 24/7 relationship; ‘friends never seek to consume each other or fall into a perpetual embrace’ (Vernon, 2006: 148); long absences need not jeopardize the relationship, even if years intervene between encounters; ‘where have you been?’ is not a question whose answer is likely to spell betrayal and hurt. Friendship is not a common life project. It is comparatively episodic, however thick its intimacies may be. Its ideals are then more easily realized in practice because it doesn’t have to face the challenges of coupledom.
As far as the possibilities for erotic friendships are concerned, it calls for friends to muster communicative skills that allow them – like in love – to dissect and continuously talk about ‘the relationship’, especially since cultural schemes are unavailable. They are limit cases that sit on the cusp between love and friendship and seek to reconcile both freedoms, restrictive and inclusive. These relationships share love’s inward-looking gaze. As lovers, erotic friends are called upon to discuss, mould and shape, undo and redo the relationship as sentiment and desire fluctuate; as friends, they need to hold close watch over the boundaries between friendship and the ever-available terrain of ordinary coupledom. Like lovers, erotic friends walk a fine line between the need for autonomy and solidarity to an extent platonic, intimate friends rarely need to. And while they attempt to carve out a relational space in which to be oneself in another the freedom of intimacy may indeed be realized – if not always then now and then, to suit separate needs, until further notice. And so both kinds of freedom appear to meet in that most ambivalent of all contemporary mantras for living: freedom of choice.
What, then, can we make of Agnes Heller’s ‘the beauty of friendship’? As a benchmark and as lived intimacy it highlights gendered unfreedoms in personal life; it may ask us to reflect on the relentless hammering home of gender differences to the exclusion of that which we hold in common. Yet, it cannot but partake in the perpetuation of the same exclusionary dynamics because it is embedded in society – a society at which this small world, in turn, permits us to look with fresh eyes. When we do so, what we might see is this: if the freest of all human associations can realize its freedom only to the extent that friends refuse to reduce each other to gendered abstractions, then we can see clearly that our society is a divided society. But to the extent that we do experience intimacy in friendship, we also learn, here, with each other, the practical meaning of respect, of justice, what these intangibles feel like and how they may be realized in personal life. Once known, we are able to judge their absence or presence, because we can reflect on their meaning from the grounds of experience. Friendship, for all its limits, thus points beyond itself. Its beauty may well lie in its capacity to show us both: what we may lack and what might yet be possible as we continue to negotiate the vicissitudes of modernity.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.