Long-Lasting Friendships 271findings suggest not only that increased use of maintenance behaviors might be
associated with increasing the friendship status from casual to close or best friends
but also that in the context of cross- sex friendships the individuals may be using
maintenance behaviors to escalate the platonic friendship to a romantic relationship.
In sum, this body of research on friendships suggests that the sex of the friends
involved in the relationship may play an interesting role in determining the type,
frequency, and goal of the maintenance behaviors used to maintain the friendship.
However, this research is still in the beginning stages of fully exploring the role of
the friends’ sex. For example, research has largely ignored how factors such as sexual
orientation or transgendered status might be related to engaging in friendship main-
tenance behaviors (see chapter 4 for more on these topics). Likewise, most of this
research has looked at gender as a binary construct and simply measured sex clas-
sification. However, gender roles might play an important role. For example, Aylor
and Dainton (2004) found that for romantic relationship maintenance it was the
individuals’ gender roles (measured as masculinity and femininity), rather than sex,
that were a better predictor of their use of maintenance behaviors. Thus, this is an
area where additional research could be useful to fully understand the role of sex,
gender roles, and sexual orientation in friendship maintenance.
Friendship Maintenance
and Relationship Satisfaction
Friendship maintenance behaviors should function to contribute to mutual inti-
macy, closeness, and commitment, which have been identified as essential aspects
of a friendship (Wiseman, 1986). The four friendship maintenance behaviors
(supportiveness, positivity, openness, and interaction) have been found to corre-
late with, and statistically predict, an individual’s satisfaction with the friendship
(Oswald et al., 2004). However, friendship commitment was predicted by support-
iveness and interaction but not by one’s use of openness or positivity. This suggests
that while positivity and openness may play a role in making the friendship satisfy-
ing, they do not have the same predictive strength with commitment to the friend-
ship. It may be that supportiveness and interaction allow the friendships to develop
a deeper level of emotional intimacy that promotes long- term commitment.
If maintenance behaviors are enacted to keep a relationship at the desired level
of satisfaction, then usage of maintenance behaviors should also be associated with
friendship longevity. To examine the predictive ability of maintenance behaviors
over time and distance, Oswald and Clark (2003) examined the maintenance of
best friendships during the first year of college. Best friendships during adoles-
cence and young adulthood provide an interesting opportunity to understand the
function of friendship maintenance during times of transition. For young adults,
close friendships are beginning to become more stable, compared with childhood