Social relationships Essay Example for Free

Social relationships Essay Everybody would agree that friendship courses through our lives, yet its precise nature is unique for every person and, therefore, is difficult to define. Typically, friendship is thought of as a voluntary relationship. Since there are few formal rules or rituals sanctioning friendship in this culture, people enter and exit friendships as they choose. Further, since friendship is often fused with other social roles, marital partners, siblings, or coworkers often choose to regard one another as friends. Acknowledging that friendship is culturally recognized as transcending formal institutional requirements and statuses, Paine (1974) referred to friendship as a kind of institutionalized non-institution (p. 128). Overall, friendship is a voluntary, personal, equal, and mutual relationship with affective ties. Undoubtedly, positive feelings, voluntary caring, and concern for the other, the touchstones of companionship, exist between friends. And while friends may feel profound love for each other, the love of friendship is usually distinguished from sexual or romantic loving, with their overtones of possessiveness and exclusivity. Even so, relationships involving these latter forms of loving may also include or aspire to the ideal-typical characteristics of friendship as well. In addition to its voluntary aspect, friendship involves persons paired in the same social role (friend-friend) (Paine, 1974). This quality contrasts with other relationships, such as the marital relationship, in which partners occupy complementary roles (wife-husband). Because of friendships inherent symmetry, friends come together as equals in order to establish a relationship in which intimacy, trust, honesty, respect, and affection may thrive. Ideally, friendship offers a nonhierarchical relationship in which a person can present a self reasonably free of contrivance and ulterior motives (Suttles, 2001, p. 110). While developing and sustaining a friendship, persons must assume that the other is presenting his or her true self if the friendship is to flourish. Reflecting its voluntary and rather fluid status in the social world, friendship is a private relationship created via the friends ongoing negotiation of the friendships rules of behavior (Paine, 1974 ). Friendships are thus self-managed (Wiseman, 2006, p. 192) since specific friendship practices are not mandated by formal societal rules in American culture. Friends are free to create their own private and personal culture. But this freedom is also dangerous, for the persistence of the relationship utterly depends on the friends actions, values, and motives. Thus, friendship is arguably the most fragile social bond. Wiseman (2006) states that if friendship loses the qualities which make for the extraordinary closeness combined with the voluntariness it encourages, it chances loss of all. There is no standard role or task around which the relationship can re-form and no societal mechanism is activated to ensure or even encourage reconciliation. (p. 192) Although the precise behavioral parameters of friendship are not institutionalized in American society to the degree that romantic, professional, political, or kin relationships are, there are some informal rules of conduct and cultural images guiding the practices of friendship. These rules pertained to keeping confidences, respecting the others privacy, and assisting the other in times of need. The culturally idealized images of friendship and the informal friendship rules offer persons ways of practicing friendship, for those images and rules frame the everyday enactment of friendship. The interactions of friends are understood to a significant degree in light of what it means to be a friend in a particular society. Idealized images and informal rules may also guide the perceptions of observers, for, when questioned about their friendship, friends may point to these cultural images of friendship or to the rules of friendship behavior to validate their relationship. References Paine R. (1974). An exploratory analysis in middle-class culture. In E. Leyton (Ed. ), The compact: Selected dimensions of friendship (pp. 117-137). St. Johns: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Suttles G. D. (2001). Friendship as a social institution. In G. J. McCall, M. McCall , N. K. Denzin, G. D. Suttles, S. Kurth (Eds. ), Social relationships (pp. 95-135). Chicago: Aldine. Wiseman J. P. (2006). Friendship: Bonds and binds in a voluntary relationship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 3, 191-211.