Friendship, Conflict and Dissolution

Rules of Friendship

From a rules perspective, people are faced with choices. As mutual expectations regarding what is appropriate in a given situation, rules generally function as criteria for choice among alternatives. As constraints on the availability of choices, rules are guides to action. These constraints are normative in that when people know the rules, they tend to conform to them.

Data collected from a variety of countries show that the following six rules are generally endorsed as important for friendship:

• 1.
  Volunteering help in time of need.
• 2.
  Trusting and confiding in each other.
• 3.
  Showing verbal and nonverbal emotional support.
• 4.
  Communicating in ways that make him or her happy while in each other's company.
• 5.
  Speaking up for the other in his or her absence.
• 6.
  Sharing news of success with him or her.

This list is not meant to be all-inclusive but, rather, to suggest that identifiable rules define and govern friendships. If one views all but the second rule as indicative of a helping orientation and the second rule as the trust-confidentiality dimension, then helping orientation, trust, and confidentiality are important in defining friendship.

Identifying rules that are essential to a relationship more clearly distinguishes that specific relationship from other types. For example, friendship may be distinguished from romantic relationships, especially marriage. For many people, marriage involves its own rules such as agreeing to express a long-term commitment in a public ritual or wedding, to no longer play the field, to engage in sex, to share property, and to have and care for children. In the United States, spouses also expect one another to be good friends, so they usually share two relationships, a marriage and a friendship.

Friendship Conflicts

Like people in other types of relationships, friends may engage in many conflicts that do not involve relationship rules. For example, they may disagree about a political candidate, movie, or type of food. These disagreements usually do not threaten the friendship. However, disagreements about the rules of friendship may dissolve it.

Friendship rules become issues in interpersonal conflicts when one of the friends breaks one or more relationship rules, such as failing to help in time of need or lying to the other. Another way occurs when friends misunderstand the friendship rules and take too much advantage of others. The friendship rules are the issues in the conflict because the people involved have tacitly or overtly agreed on them, and now one person has violated or misunderstood one or more of the relationship rules.

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