Reason,Season,or Life? Heterorelationality and the Limits of Intimacy between Women Friends

Abstract

Studies of personal life over the past three decades have provided rich accounts of new forms of togetherness, with some pointing to a loosening of hierarchical lines between friends, kin, family, and long-term sexual partnership. While acknowledging the importance of these queering perspectives, I suggest that asking how people use ‘traditional’ relationship distinctions remains valuable. Reporting on research centred on practices of intimacy between women friends in early midlife, I examine how the competing demands of long-term sexual partnerships and family are managed alongside friendship, asking what forms of intimacy between friends are sanctioned or disparaged. I show that the organising logics of heteroromantic orders prevail, working through the contemporary cultural pushes of postfeminism and individualisation. As a result, friendships become constructed as bonus entities in relational life – necessary, but always supplementary to the mainstays of sexual partnership and familial relationships.

Keywords

heterorelationality individualisation personal relationships postfeminism practice theory women’s friendships

Introduction

This article explores some ways women in early midlife (late twenties to late forties) position their relationships with female friends. How important is friendship for this group? What place is it assigned in the normative trajectories of life? I report on data from critical qualitative research with women of various backgrounds in one Western liberal democracy – Aotearoa/New Zealand. My concern in this research was to explore the resources women had available to make sense of this aspect of their relational lives, examining their accounts and narratives to understand the multiple, intersecting, cultural agendas that organise practices of intimate relating.

Sociological research has long suggested there will be considerable complexity in women’s navigation of friendship norms in relation to long-term sexual relationship identities and mothering (Cronin, 2015; Gullestad, 1984; Harrison, 1998; O’Connor, 1991). Reflecting these negotiations, instances of tension in friendships between women can also be found in popular culture, and the following excerpt is one such example. It is from an agony-aunt style newspaper column and responds to a reader who wrote in feeling neglected by a recently married friend:

The best friendships evolve over time and picking up where you left off should be as easy after a decade as it is after a day. The depth of a friendship can’t be judged by proximity, the regularity of your communication or occasional disappointments, but by your compatibility and the generosity with which you accept each other’s foibles. Celebrating good fortune and sustaining each other in times of trouble is the way to move forward, not stamping your foot and waving your fist when you’re not getting the level of attention you’re used to.

(Frostrup, 2016)

Note that while ‘depth of friendship’ is emphasised, contingency is simultaneously promoted. Friends should sustain each other, but it is taken as fact that friendships ‘evolve’, and lack of proximity must be accepted. The distress that the letter-writer felt about her newlywed friend not having time to see her is invalidated by the agony aunt. Instead, feeling neglect is positioned as an immature response, accompanied by the suggestion that an opportunity to celebrate a friend’s good fortune is being lost. By contrast, in the case of a sexual partnership relationship, it might be predicted that an agony aunt would deem less involvement in one another’s life as a sign of troubled relationship. In addition to hinting at how prioritisation is managed, these contrasting sentiments signal the different ontological statuses given to the relationship types.

Queer perspectives provide a rich set of theoretical tools for thinking about the differing affective investments in friendships and long-term sexual relationships. They disrupt the naturalness of the inevitable decline of friendship intimacy in order to ‘develop’ long-term sexual relationships. For example, Adrienne Rich’s (1980) concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ elaborates on how a range of structures inhibit women’s togetherness. Likewise, Michael Warner’s (1991) ‘reprosexuality’ highlights how heterosexuality is privileged through the expectations and idealisation of reproduction and starting families. Through reprosexuality, homosexuality is devalued because of its non-reproductive status, and parallels can thus be drawn with heteronormative framings of friendship. In another, key contribution, Sasha Roseneil and Sally Budgeon problematise the privileging of family, for which heterosexual couples are the starting point. They point to the dominance of ‘heterorelationality’, or the rigid norms of heterosexual relationship order – ‘of co-residence, romantic love, monogamy and the primacy of the conjugal couple’ (Budgeon and Roseneil, 2004: 129). However, Budgeon and Roseneil’s more recent investigations have focused on exploring ‘alternative’ forms of friendships and family, and opportunities for working outside heterorelational orders (Budgeon, 2006; Budgeon and Roseneil, 2004; Roseneil, 2006; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004; Roseneil and Ketokivi, 2015). This important body of work follows in the tradition of other ground-breaking research that showed how non-heterosexual communities promoted friends as chosen families (Nardi, 1992; Plummer, 1992; Weeks et al., 2001; Weston, 1991). As such, Budgeon and Roseneil’s work is a potent renewal of investigations where friendship is treated as an ethical project, by demonstrating the possibilities of blurring of boundaries between friendship, coupledom, and family. Fuelling their project is a wish to decentre the family and the heterosexual couple in our intellectual imaginaries (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004: 135; see also Cronin, 2015).

Why then, am I returning to ask how heterorelational orders are reproduced? First, although the prospect of reworked kinship formations today represents a challenge to heterorelationality, we need to be careful that we do not overstate the degree of change occurring in late modern times (Holland et al., 2003; Jamieson, 1998). As Graham Allan (2008) puts it:

The shifting structural context in which family and friend relationships are constructed inevitably influences their patterning, but the increased relational flexibility of contemporary society does not signify that the solidarities they involve are thereby becoming synonymous. (p. 14)

Despite the blurring between categories of family, friends, and partnership, people continue to maintain distinctions between them. Although Roseneil and Budgeon’s (2004: 153) suggestion that intimate life should be studied as networks or flows of intimacy, we need also to bear in mind that ‘traditional’ distinctions may be used flexibly and fluidly, potentially reinstating heteronormativity (Speer and Potter, 2000). This leads to my second point. Queer forms of togetherness do not necessarily stem the flow of assumptions of the sanctity of heteroromantic love, whose continued thriving is evident in popular culture (Arend, 2016; Illouz, 2013; Martin and Kazyak, 2009). It may even be increasingly difficult to challenge heterorelationality today, as traditional family ideals are promulgated within postfeminist logics (Gill, 2009; McRobbie, 2013). Women’s re-engagement with traditional and/or conservative forms of sexual/romantic love and motherhood is flourishing via discourses of choice and empowerment (Evans et al., 2010; Gill, 2009; McRobbie, 2013; Orgad and De Benedictis, 2015). In this very complex milieu of discourses representing change and stasis, or traditional and emergent forms of intimacy, studies detailing how relationship categories are used in different contexts are needed.

The current research was designed to explore some of the competing everyday ideologies that women live out in their friendship relating, acknowledging their varied positioning in heterorelational and reprosexual orders. Just like age, class, or geographies, heterorelational and reprosexual positionings are associated with particular but fluid practices. One of the aims of the research was to ask how women dealt with possible conflicting demands on their time and attentions, particularly relating to long-term sexual relationships and motherhood. As such, a loose category of women in ‘early midlife’, late twenties to late forties, informed the age range. Younger and older women can of course be mothers and partners and face similar challenges. However, positioning within heterorelational orders is more visible for women in this age range (Lahad, 2017).

Methods and procedures

The data analysed are drawn from research investigating practices of intimacy between women friends, aged late twenties to late forties, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. All participants gave written, informed consent and the study received ethics approval from University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee. Pseudonyms have been provided for participants.

I hoped to provide insights into a range of processes involved in doing women’s friendship by using three data collection methods, which attempt to direct analytic attention to three different scales – broad/social, interactional, and biographical. First, 145 participants took part in a written exercise, based on vignette methods (Braun and Clarke, 2013; Clarke et al., 2014). The participants for this part of the data collection volunteered in response to a newspaper article I contributed to about women’s friendship (Fletcher, 2015). Using an online platform normally utilised to deliver surveys (Qualtrics), participants were asked to think about and respond to a series of five vignettes presenting the unfolding story of a friendship involving three fictional characters. Each vignette depicted a problem that the characters encountered over a nine-year period of the fictional friendship. Participants worked through the vignettes at their own pace, and were asked to puzzle over elements of the predicaments the three friends encountered through questions that accompanied the vignettes. This method was used primarily to generate data that would answer questions about how women’s friendships are ordered within the broad ideological context of friendship, including its relationship to other forms of care and intimacy. As such, my probes for this part of the research needed to provoke the kinds of received wisdom of friendship the women had available to draw upon.

At the end of the written activity, participants were invited to take part in further research activities. Those interested indicated a preference in taking part in an individual interview or small discussion group. The group discussions were designed to focus attention on identity processes at the interactional level. It was intended that they be made up of three to five participants. However, in practice, it was often difficult to bring participants together in one place at the same time and two of the scheduled group discussions became dyadic. This turned out to be advantageous; with the dyad interviews there was greater opportunity for participants to share and become invested in one another’s stories. Thus, as has been found elsewhere (Morgan et al., 2013), a more intimate research environment was created with the pairs. Finally, it was hoped that individual interviews would aid understanding in the processes involved in doing cultures of women’s intimacy at the psychological level, as a one-to-one interview allowed the opportunity for women to develop longer uninterrupted accounts of their own personal biographies and experiences of friendship. In both the group discussions and interviews, conversations were wide ranging, and were guided by a loose schedule of open-ended questions.

In total, 16 individual interviews, 2 dyad interviews, and 4 small group discussions were carried out with 33 participants, 2 of whom opted not to provide demographic information. Of the remainder, nine participants identified as non-heterosexual. All were able bodied. Most identified as of European descent, but six participants identified as mixed ethnicity. The study was not designed to investigate indigenous, Māori, perspectives on friendship patterns and was located within the culture of the majority Pākehā group (non-indigenous peoples, primarily European). The practices of intimacy explored can be more broadly located within ‘Western’ frameworks of intimacy (Jamieson, 2011). Although most self-identified as middle class on the participant demographics form, it became clear that not all participants were working to the same class distinction systems. Some participants asked for advice on answering this question. These discrepancies perhaps reflect changing notions of class in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In 2009, more New Zealanders believed that their society was predominantly middle class than in the previous two decades, despite rising inequality and of people in lower wage brackets (Gendall and Murray, 2010).

The research was not set up in a way to provide intersectional analyses, with one exception. One aspect of intersectionality that I originally intended to interrogate related to identities associated with heterorelational and reprosexual orders. Yet, as I demonstrate in the material presented in this article, in defining the limits of intimacies in friendships there were more similarities than differences across the participants, despite variability in partnered/non-partnered/parent status and sexuality. Although I did not target specific groups during recruitment, it was useful that there were a mix of partnered (including polyamory) and non-partnered (single, divorced/separated, temporarily asexual), and parent (21 participants) as well as non-parent participants who took part in interviews and groun discussions (for an exigesis of the project as a whole, see Martinussen, 2018).

My theoretical and methodological approach makes use of discursive affective practice theory developed by Margaret Wetherell (2012, 2014). The analysis phase consisted of providing ‘thick’ description of the entanglements and relationships between various spaces, ideas, bodies, objects, memories, broad cultural factors, and personal histories and asking what forms of order and pattern can be discerned (Brown et al., 2011; Wetherell, 2014). I am interested in the mobilisation of discursive resources located within imagined positions (Edley and Wetherell, 1999), personal orders (Wetherell, 2005), interpretive repertiores, everyday ideologies, and canonical narratives (Wetherell, 1998, 2012). Efforts were made to track trouble and contradiction, as well as absences – topics and positions that seemed unspeakable or unintelligible. As has been argued extensively (Wetherell, 1998, 2012), a key advantage of critical discursive psychology, upon which an affective practice approach draws, is that it allows analysts to attend to multi-level foci including: (a) micro- to mid-level analysis of the reflexive accomplishment of identity work in conversation and (b) how the resources for this identity work are constituted through the broader discursive field. Asking ‘what does this do as a form of social action?’ I (re)read transcripts, moving between micro, personal/mid, and macro analytic foci.

Analysing talk-data on friendship practices

This analysis is organised around three interpretive repertoires made use of by participants which show how these culturally recognisable discursive practices are used to justify the prioritisation of long-term sexual relationships. The first is centred on ideologies of autonomy in friendship. The second reproduces expectations of the impermanence of friendship. Finally, potentially painful deprioritisations of friendships are smoothed over, through embracing assumptions of necessary flexibility in the management of friendships.

The age and research activity participants attended to is provided in parenthesis introducing each data excerpt. Ellipsis in square brackets indicates where some text has been removed.

Freedom, flexibility, and autonomous friends

Over the first set of examples below, I investigate the affective evaluative work involved as participants develop distinctions between friendship and long-term sexual partnership. Here, Dee (34, dyad interview) is responding to a question on how friendship qualities that exist within a long-term sexual partnership compare with those within a (non-sexual) friendship, with a woman friend:

That was the reason why my marriage fell apart really, was because it was only a friendship and we didn’t really realise […] we should have just been friends […] But it’s completely different because if you are a partner with someone you are living together and you are running your life, even if it’s parallel train tracks, you know, you are running two separate lives together. If my friend suddenly decides to invest in an investment property that has no effect on me but if my partner does, it does. When she is really, really busy and away on business, I go and see other friends, but if my partner was going to be away on business for six months I have then got to work out- I’m going to be a single person for six months and the structure of my life and keep in touch with him and things like that. It’s quite different because you are running your lives together whereas friends can run their lives in their own little circles and then pull together when they need to.

The relative devaluing of friendship is put in motion when Dee proposes her marriage ended because they realised the relationship was ‘only a friendship’, that they ‘should have just been friends’. But Dee’s analogy of different ‘tracks’ then crystallises contrasting felt experiences for the relationship types. She formulates a pressing need to run tracks in parallel within a partnership. The very ‘structure’ of life is understood to change, even in a temporary absence of a partner, requiring maintenance work to keep the tracks running side by side. Intensity is invoked. Conversely, the coming together of the separate activities of friends is seen as more discretionary. Reunions are brief, occurring as needed, each in their own ‘little circle’. The needs of women-friends are posited as fewer, and more easily fulfilled by a rotating cohort. For Dee, investing in property or moving away for six months impacts friends minimally. As Lucy, another interview participant, put it ‘what works really well for me is that I can tap in and tap out as I need to’. While not implying that friendships are unimportant to Lucy or Dee, I am suggesting the ideological effects of these vocabularies of flexibility and ease construct friendships as essential, but accessories, within personal lives.

I will stay with the question of what it means to run lives ‘on the same tracks’, but here, for women friends, rather than long-term sexual partners. Data were prompted for this when participants were presented with the following vignette:

Aroha and Laila have now been close friends for nine years. They still socialise together regularly and they share a house with two other flatmates. Aroha has just started seeing someone romantically but she’s much closer to Laila, and they often talk about how great it is living under the same roof. When Laila came home today she told Aroha that she had been offered a job overseas, and asked Aroha if she wanted to move overseas as well.

Participants were then asked how Aroha would respond to the question of moving overseas with her friend. Before reviewing the responses, it should be noted that although some aspects of the situation were left ambiguous intentionally, allowing space for participants’ evaluations, the vignettes determined the accounting frame, and required participants to problem-solve a relatively narrow scenario. This is rather different from the openness characteristic of everyday conversation or even those of unstructured interviews and group discussions, where varying contexts for accounts emerge as the conversation flows. Nonetheless, the vignette format was useful for exploring common understandings about the affective practices of friendship.

A great majority of responses to the vignette put the closeness of the friendship as just one of many considerations for the Aroha character. The possibility of her long-term prospects with someone ‘she has just started seeing’ was often put forward as the factor most likely to influence her decision. For example:

I think Aroha will stay behind and continue her new relationship. Relationships start to become more important than friendships to many people.

It completely depends on how she sees her new relationship panning out. If she thinks it could be serious she will probably not leave.

The range and breadth of considerations that someone in Aroha’s position would need to weigh up was striking. For instance:

That completely depends on Aroha and her situation. If she’s a spontaneous person who’s always been interested in travel then she may go for it. It depends on so many things - how she thinks her relationship is likely to pan out, how close she is with her family and whether it’s important for her to be geographically near them, whether she’s likely to get a job fairly easily overseas etc. Their age is also a big factor.

It depends on a lot of unknown variables. If being with Laila is more important to Aroha than the things tying her to her current country, or if she’s unsatisfied with her life in this country and thinks starting afresh overseas might be good for her, if she’s not particularly invested in the person she has just started seeing, then she may say yes. But if Aroha has family, other friends, hobbies, a satisfying job etc. where she is now, and/or would like to continue to pursue a relationship with the person she’s started seeing, she is unlikely to want to sacrifice all that for an almost-complete unknown.

Although such responses suggest it would be a possibility that Aroha would move overseas with Laila, her needs and expectations as a family member or worker, her appetite for change, and long-term sexual partnership are presented as the main considerations. While it is assumed there will be attempts to chart how job opportunities and a long-term sexual relationship might pan out, it is not suggested that similar predictive techniques should or will be applied to the friendship. There is also a vocabulary of instrumentalisation and rational management apparent here, reminiscent of a postfeminist mandate. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad (2018) write of women working in a register which sets up daily life as a challenge that must be managed; in personal life, women have become responsibilised, intimate entrepreneurs (Gill, 2009). In the context of this scenario, in compartmentalising and assessing of various life components, Aroha’s special relationship with Laila becomes a variable that is considered secondarily. This is implied through omitting considerations of any grave consequences for the friends. However, a few responses go further and effectively warn against including the friendship in the decision:

Aroha has her own life etc where she is. She would have to look at the pros and cons and what she really wants with her life, not what Laila wants with Aroha’s life.

Accept the offer for the intent as genuine but want to lead her own life.

I don’t think Aroha should go, I think she should live her own life. In my view she would decline the offer. Both friends will be better off for the time apart.

Although the vignette implied the friends’ lives were heavily intertwined, these responses construct the friendship as outside Aroha’s ‘life situation’. What is included in Aroha’s ‘own life’ is unclear, but linking with the responses provided up to this point, the expectations relating to family, job, geographical location, or the potentiality of a long-term partner seem to more readily constitute a ‘life situation’ than friendship. Again, I am not proposing friendships are insignificant in women’s relational-scape, or that there are any ‘right’ answers to this vignette. However, the data suggest that the concerns of friendship occupy a position as outside other, ‘integral’ components of life.

The idea that friendship can fill the spaces between ‘primary’ parts of life was also produced in the responses to a question asking participants why Laila would ask Aroha to move overseas with her. A minority of participants cited the strong bond of the women and Laila’s desire to not live apart from her best friend as the main reasons. In many examples though, although the Laila character was evaluated as reasonable, and the friendship as significant, participants suggested that her motivations were of an instrumental type:

She doesn’t want to lose her good friendship, and she might even be scared about going alone, so the thought of going through it with a friend might make her feel safer and happier, and less nervous

Because she wants her friend to be with her overseas - she probably sees it as a bit of a security blanket for herself, also an adventure for them both, and an opportunity for Aroha.

In the most extreme cases of ‘security blanket’ discourse, there was suggestion that the friends were too close. For example:

Because she scared to be without her and the relationship had become co-dependant which is not really cool.

She can’t see life without Aroha. I think she is being selfish in her question to Aroha about moving.

She is socially and emotionally dependent on her.

Although brief, such accounts indicate the pervasiveness of psychologised knowledges, where it ‘makes sense’ to understand women who prioritise the development of their friendships as having ‘unhealthy attachments’.

Similarly, some participants put forward the idea that a decrease in the intensity of the friendship would be a positive development. The following extracts are in reply to the question of ‘what happens to the friends over the next couple of years?’

I think Laila goes overseas, leaving Aroha behind. Aroha builds a life with her new partner. The friends remain close and talk frequently. The distance has made their relationship stronger.

As they get older I think that they will be able to value and maintain their relationship whether they are in the same country or not.

They will all remain friends if they accept and respect that the tides of life may sometimes pull them in different directions and that each person will grow and change themselves, as well as within their friendships.

As friendship is discounted from acting as a ‘tide of life’ with the power to pull women ‘in different directions’, the organising logics of heterorelationality come into view. Notions of flexibility, autonomy, and contingency become the guiding principle. Needing to ‘grow and change’ the self is presented as incompatible with continuing intertwining of lives of friends, the fate of which is positioned as outside one’s control. Over the next data examples, from interviews and group discussions, I detail how some of the discursive repertoires identified through the vignette data are used in interaction.

Temporal and unpredictable trajectories

This talk follows Denise’s (demographic details unavailable, interview) explanations of how moving often affected her friendships. She mentioned becoming aware that she would not ‘invest’ in new friendships if she knew she was moving soon after, because she ‘would feel some loss with it’. In answering a follow-up question about staying friends after moving away, Denise discusses how some of these friends were more superficial, because they were associated with her children’s activities:

Denise:

They go to play groups and they go to kindergarten and so circumstances around how that friendship developed changed. And you know, school, once school- you have a school-aged child, again you develop relationships with people in, within that sphere, you know, and so, and some of those other friendships that had been there and related to that situation, they change and I wouldn’t want to you think that I’m being casual around friendships because I’m not. But I believe that sometimes people come into our lives for a particular reason and they support us or we support them and sometimes, I mean I realised in my late 20s and 30s that sometimes those friendships are there for that time and they’re not a friendship that you would have lifelong, they’re different, they’re just a different type of friendship.

Maree:

And so you don’t necessarily feel that loss that you mentioned earlier.

Denise:

Not always. No. It was just a growing apart. It was a coming together and then a growing apart. And yeah I think it’s quite a natural part of our life, to have people come in and out and I think as a younger person I felt that quite keenly, that I had to hold on to friendships, you know, but moving around a lot probably influenced how I saw them and it changed my thinking on them.

The excerpt illustrates the types of identity work involved in reproducing expectations that friendships will always change, with Denise’s account legitimating short-lived friendships. In addition to starting off by linking changes in her friendships to her children’s inevitably changing activities, the next unfolding in talk sees Denise provide another view, where short-lived relationships are validated through a fate narrative – friends come ‘into our lives for a particular reason’.

As mentioned, in an earlier conversation Denise said that if she knew she was about to move from an area, she avoided deeper involvement with new friends. Here, she uses the same resource from her personal life story, moving a lot, to support a different position – a realisation that she need not feel loss, nor ‘hold on to friendships’. This growing apart is linked with ‘changed thinking’ and self-development. The language of ‘investment’, ‘development’, and the rationality of the reflexive assessments about what should (not) be felt are all traces of neoliberal subjectivities (Gill, 2009). This rational management explains why there are relatively few narratives outlining distress at friendships’ decreasing intimacies across the corpus. The dominant picture constructed is of relatively easy re-orderings of friendships.

Relevant here is an accounting strategy for the re-working of friendship practices that came up in a few of the interviews. Some participants referred to an adage from a poem (unknown author) that begins:

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. When you figure out which one it is, you will know what to do for each person.

Although the ‘lifetime friend’ trumps shorter-term friend categories, the trope nevertheless legitimises ‘reason’ and ‘season’ friends. This rationale aids in de-prioritisations of friendships, because women-friends may choose to designate the friendship a ‘reason’ or ‘season’ variety, rather than construct it as a friendship failure. And because that person remains a friend, albeit a less valued one, upset is not warranted.

The reason-season-life logic is made use of in the next stretch of talk. Here, Maya (28, interview) responds to my question, ‘Can you think of a particular experience you’ve had when you’ve stopped being friends with someone?’ She originally replied she could not think of anyone but I prompted further with: ‘[is there an example] where there were questions in your mind about what the terms of the relationship were?’ Maya then explained that there was one example that stood out because it ‘went from burning the hottest to now being the coldest, not cold, like we are still friends’. (Pseudonyms have been provided for Maya’s friends.):

If you asked me […] seven years ago ‘who is your best bud?’ […] I would be like ‘oh Kendrick. Kendrick, Kelly and Nell are my buds’. Whereas now it’s kind of like ‘yeah Kelly and Nell still definitely but Kendrick didn’t make it through’. But I wonder if that was very much there’s that reason-season life thing, someone for a reason, for a season or for life. I think she was definitely like a season thing. She was like an undergrad uni season, you know. And I very much hold true to that, to that whole reason, season, life thing. I think I’ve got some life friends for sure. I’ve got some friends that were in my life for a reason for a little while and then like kind of work or whatever and then there is kind of my season, like my [graduate] friends, my undergrad friends, my [postgraduate] friends.

Maya’s long description of her weakening friendship with Kendrick, of which this excerpt is a small part, did not contain many certainties about why the friendship lost its force, but neither were there claims of animosity or distress. Marking out friendships as passing seasons is presented as typical, and Maya confirms that in addition to Kendrick, many of her friends are categorised this way, including friends from different stages of study and work. Also, presenting the reason-season-life metaphor as a ‘whole … thing’, infers that it is an accepted and established framework. Although Maya’s pointing out that she does retain ‘life friends’ indicates their high value, categorising friends as season friends is normalised.

So far, I have outlined a range of discursive repertoires and accounting strategies that construct friendship as a part of life to be rationally managed, but underscored by assumptions that friendship trajectories are more contingent than long-term sexual partnerships. I have shown also how participants produce repertoires of growing into ‘healthy’ levels of autonomy, where carving out and managing an individual trajectory is a main life task. Categories such as reason or season friends, construct various forms of relationship losses as successful reworkings, and not relationship breakdowns.

In the final section of the analysis, I briefly turn to investigating other patterns where participants do acknowledge that these reorganisations of intimacies might be difficult. Yet, as I demonstrate, low affect responses take discursive priority.

Freedom and low affect in friendships

Evaluations of friends who were worried about their friendships changing were sought when participants were presented with the following vignette:

Chun’s relationship with someone she has been dating has been getting serious. Although neither Chun nor Aroha have mentioned it, they’re both feeling that Chun’s serious romantic relationship might change their friendship.

Participants were then asked ‘Are Chun and Aroha right to be worried about their friendship changing?’ Most participants agreed that this was a common predicament. For example:

Well, it’s just part of life, relationships have to evolve, and if they are good enough friends, they will continue to prioritise time with each other.

Yes, friendships can easily change when each person’s circumstance changes. But this can change again at any point, so it’s important to try harder during these times to show interest in what your friend is going through.

Yes they are. Friendships are forever changing and that’s a good thing. They need to find their new normal.

Yes. It’s only natural for things to change when a relationship starts and grows into something more serious. You typically start to hang out with your partner more.

In part, these responses simply reflect the vignette set up, which makes a link between partnered status, changed friendship practices, and worry. However, they also show how participants construct and reconcile two contradictory positions: (a) the inevitability that friendships will change, and therefore some validation of worry, versus (b) a good friend’s changed partnership status not affecting the closeness of friends. The solution offered by participants is that a ‘new normal’ must be found by friends, to stretch so as to accommodate partners. In addition, feelings of worry are constructed as natural but temporary, and therefore not deserving of dwelling on further.

In a minority of the responses a different position was taken up, where worry was highlighted as being an inaccurate description:

Worried isn’t quite the right word but aware of it certainly. Friendships change- they do come and go. The hope is that that they will stand the test of time and change.

Maybe … However, when a relationship becomes serious it becomes no longer appropriate to discuss intimate matters with other people, even your closest friends. I think they are right to be attentive to their friendship at such a time, but should also be mindful that it is the nature of friendships to change.

I don’t know that worried is the correct word. Friendships do change when other relationships change - particularly new romantic relationships. I think they are right to acknowledge that the friendship might change.

Why is the position of worried friend avoided? Why is ‘attentive’ or ‘acknowledging’ instead advocated, when feeling distress over tensions that are purported to be inevitably present? As has been evident in previous responses, while advancing long-term sexual relationships is assumed a valid way to develop the self, a similar vocabulary to understand self-development through deepening friendship does not seem to exist. It is presented as unreasonable to feel worry or concern if a friendship is under threat. The promotion of each other’s healthy autonomy within friendships results in having to ‘hope … that they will stand the test of time’, with no guarantees they will.

Discussion and conclusion

I set out to investigate how friendships between women can be valued today. I did so against a backdrop of pluralising forms of relationships and family units, which potentially offer a more ambiguous space for women to develop deeper friendships and a disruption to the sanctity of matrimonial and maternal imperatives. My analysis also oriented to showing how changing technologies of self and increasing self-reflexivity might affect evaluations about what counts as doing good friendship.

Despite flexibility being a key theme here, normative orderings of life stages were not just left unchallenged, but were instantiated through repertoires of friendship. Activities associated with ‘getting on with life’ included growing out of intense friendships of youth, meeting a long-term sexual partner, becoming a mother, travelling overseas, or laying out plans for a career. A factor intersecting with heterorelational orders was the reliance on modes of rational management and autonomy. The movement between closeness and distance in friendship was constructed as relatively unproblematic and straightforward to manage. Within this set of logics, the long-term compatibility of friends was judged upon the ability to fit one another into changing lives, and less about the affinity of the friends themselves. The ‘reason/season’ categories are exemplary of the ‘get out’ clauses that Zygmunt Bauman (2003) suggests relationship participants always have at the ready. In this case, they may be administered to ‘lifetime’ friends who could not flex to accommodate other shifting parts in life. While a successful ‘progression’ through life for women as long-term sexual partnership was treated as calculable, it was constructed as impossible or undesirable to carry out similar calculations regarding friendships, whose trajectories were imagined as contingent.

Heterorelationality was brought together with the impulse towards compartmentalising of friendships through yet another everyday ideology. The things that really matter in life, that form the pivot around which decisions are made, occur outside the realm of friendship. This echoes the words of the agony aunt in the introduction, who insists that it is unacceptable to be disappointed when a friendship has ‘evolved’ (read: decreased in intimacy). Such sentiments, and the ethic of autonomy on which they appear to be based, pathologise intense friendships, thereby reducing possibilities for more sustained intertwining. The spectre of the needy, underdeveloped friend invoked by the participants acts as a warning for those who are insufficiently autonomous in their friendships.

It is difficult to pull apart the intermixing of moral orders and discursive regimes that produce these patterns of negotiations over categories of care, and correlating intensities of feelings. My analysis is indicative of the complex ways that the logics of heterorelationality, entrepreneurial life-management, and neoliberal autonomy intersect. It is possible that heterosexist imperatives and concerns about preserving constructed lines between sexual and non-sexual relationships might also be influential in decreasing opportunities for more sustained intertwining between the lives of women friends. However, it is worth noting that lesbian, queer, and polyamorous identified participants in the sample shown here made use of heterorelational sense-making repertoires in an equivalent way to the heterosexual participants. My analysis suggests that heterorelational orders may also be part of living out LGBTQI+identities. As such, we need to be careful not to tie together queer identities with an increased intensity of friendships too tightly; this may blind us to heterorelational continuities that emerge in shifting forms. For this sample, what is considered good or healthy within the affective repertoires for friends is radically different from those with long-term sexual partnership. Taking an identities practices approach, which deals with ‘smaller’, identity positions that people routinely move through in talk, has allowed me to show how subtle but pervasive heterorelational assumptions are, regardless of sexuality.

The privileging of long-term sexual relationships evident today, might at first seem like a straightforward continuity. For example, even the intense friendships of Victorian women, which flourished throughout heterosexual marriage, were marked by a privileging of long-term sexual relationships (Marcus, 2009). However, despite Victorian women encouraging one another into and through marriages, their friendships kept a passion (Marcus, 2009; Smith-Rosenberg, 1975) that is absent for a sample of 21st century women. In this study, affective practices that signalled intensity were downplayed or omitted, and there was an absence of everyday ideologies that would allow women to maintain strong investments in both friendships and long-term sexual partnerships. Moreover, a sense of a welcome freedom was frequently implied when downplaying the possibilities of feeling intensely about a friendship in adulthood. I am not suggesting that friendships should always be long-lasting, or that there would be value in conceiving friendships as constitutive of a successful progression in life, as it is for long-term sexual relationships. However, it is significant that a trajectory of female friends living successful lives together ‘on the same track’ seems to be unthinkable, or undesirable when faced with the suggestion.

Fundamentally, that women do not seem to be able to imagine a ‘discovery of self’ in friendships, as in other facets of their identity, provides explanation for the distinct lack of possibilities of sustained intertwining. Where Foucault argued that it is through sexuality that one is encouraged to explore, master, and ‘know’ oneself, Nikolas Rose (1996) suggests all dimensions of life have become rationalised, instrumentalised, and subsumed within ‘life-style’. He proposes the self itself has become the most valorised object, not the sexual-self (Rose, 1996: 30). But, for my sample at least, finding an ‘inner self’ remained more firmly linked to explorations of sexuality, and the knowing or making of self through friendship seemed to be part of a lower order dimension of lifestyle.

Perhaps however, these light investments generate some of the pleasure in doing women’s friendship today, which seem to align with a postfeminist-styled confidence. With this framing, women friends can understand themselves to be successfully (re)assessing and managing this part of their lives, and avoid feeling failures even when it does go wrong. If neoliberal marketing techniques put the onus on women to feel confident in all areas of life, and change themselves if they do not (Gill and Orgad, 2015), perhaps friendship has become a technology of self where women demonstrate their relational competencies. Longer trajectories of women’s experiences of friendship — which include care and deep bonds — are refracted through an ideal ‘enterprising self’, and women can aid each other in maximising available life choices. Yet, like a supporting act that plays before or between the headliners, women’s friendships are constructed as important, but ancillary, in the quest for fulfilment in personal life.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Margaret Wetherell, Virginia Braun, Maria João Faustino and Nilima Chowdhury, who all generously commented on earlier drafts. I acknowledge the support provided through a University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Maree Martinussen is a doctoral candidate of gender and critical social psychology at the University of Auckland. Maree’s multidisciplinary approach rests on the aim of bringing the complexities and nuances of identity-making to the fore, through the study of everyday life, in the realm of personal relating. Her current research explores the patterning of discursive-affective practices relating to intimacies between women friends in early midlife, in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

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