ronnie said It’s been a real pleasure working with such a talented group to help create this amazing online course. The videos are of the highest quality and not like anything you’ve seen before!!

ronnie It’s been a real pleasure working with such a talented group to help create this amazing online course. The videos are of the highest quality and not like anything you’ve seen before!!

What comes to mind when you hear the terms “friend” or “friendship”? The terms “friend” and “friendship” can now denote a broad variety of connections or affiliations in today’s culture. We are able to “friend” a theater, opera, museum, library, etc. Someone who is “in need” can have us as “friends.”

On social networking sites like Facebook, thousands of people are available for us to “friend.” In our daily lives, we can form friendships with people at work, in social groups, at school, in the church, and so on. Some individuals consider their spouses, siblings, and parents/guardians to be “friends.”

In fact, many of us have at least one “best friend.” Do we mean the same thing, therefore, when we use the word “friend” in all of these many contexts? In this chapter, we’ll explore the realm of interpersonal friendships, which eliminates a few things from our list (operas, museums, libraries, etc.), but leaves us with a phrase that is incredibly ill-defined.

There are as many different interpretations of friendship as there are social scientists who research it.1. A few examples of definitions found in the literature for the terms “friend” and “friendship” are shown in Table 1.

Michael Monsour asked the several chapter writers in a 2017 book on the psychology of friendship if they intended to define the term “friendship” in their respective chapters.12 Monsour discovered that the bulk of the writers intended to identify the characteristics of the term “friendship” rather than define it. We bring this up since it can be difficult to define what a “friend” and a “friendship.” It’s likely that each of us views our friendships as distinct from the others, which contributes to the difficulty in defining the words. We will follow the majority of friendship scholars in this chapter and refrain from giving a precise definition of what a friend is.

Qualities of Friendship
One of the most important scholars in the field of friendship studies, William K. Rawlins, is a communication scholar who contends that friendships differ from other types of interpersonal relationships in five key ways: they are voluntary, personal, egalitarian, involved, and affective (Figure 10.2).Thirteen