“Same-Sex” and “Opposite-Sex” 61a topic that has personal relevance to me as a human being and scholar and unabash-
edly allowing my experiences to inform and enrich my writing (1995).
Therefore, this chapter is written from the perspective of a gender and friendship
scholar whose friendships with gender- variant individuals has prompted him (me)
to reevaluate the traditional binary- based typology of “same- ” and “opposite- ” sex
friendships. As for the majority of the remaining content of this chapter, my pri-
mary purpose is to identify current knowledge on same- sex and opposite- sex adult
friendships. Part of that analysis focuses on similarities and differences between
those types of friendship. Additionally, four broad descriptive generalizations about
the literature are made. The concluding section includes speculations about future
directions in the study and practice of adult friendships. We begin our journey with
a brief examination of the difficulty experienced by both scholars and laypersons
in defining “friendship” and the equally problematic adjectives “same- sex” and
“opposite- sex.”
Defining Friendship
Friendship scholars still comment on the lack of consensus on the meaning of
friendship and how that lack of agreement makes it difficult to compare friendship
findings across studies (Chasin & Radtke, 2013). The purpose in this section is
not to arrive at a concrete definition of friendship, but rather to explore some of
the conundrums associated with trying to nail down such a definition. The prob-
lem becomes more complex and convoluted when adjectives such as “same- sex’
and “opposite- sex” are employed in an attempt to distinguish one type of friend-
ship from another. Critically examining these issues is of paramount importance to
understanding current and future approaches to the study and practice of same- and
opposite- sex friendships.
Although definitions of friendship are often traced back to books VIII and IX of
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1980; Rawlins, 2009), for purposes of this chapter
the beginning point is an observation made by Fehr almost 20 years ago: “Everyone
knows what friendship is— until asked to define it. There are virtually as many defi-
nitions of friendship as there are social scientists studying the topic” (1996, p. 5).
Fehr is referencing social scientific attempts to define friendship. In a classic book
on adult friendships, Blieszner and Adams made a similar observation concerning
lay definitions of friendship when they noted that despite the overlap in people’s
views of friendship, there is also “tremendous variation in emphasis across indi-
viduals” (1992, p. 1). The variability in scholarly and lay definitions of friendship
is partly due to the number of factors that must be accounted for when defining
friendship. Definitions depend on the stage of life in which the friendship occurs
(Monsour, 2002; Rawlins, 1992), the culture in which it exists (Gudykunst & Ting
Toomey, 1988), demographic variables (Wright, 1988), the level of intimacy (Fehr,
1996), and countless contextual factors (Adams & Allan, 1998).