68 Who Are Our Friends?
of friendship in a world in which those relationships often come in a distant second
to romantic relationships. Her book is based on interviews with individuals from all
walks of life, including gays and lesbians, and she was an especially keen observer
of friendships between women and men, though her book focused on same- sex
friendships as well.
In 1992, Rosemary Blieszner and Rebecca Adams, two of the contributors to
this book (see chapter 3), published their book Adult Friendship. As a newly minted
PhD with a burning interest in friendship, I found in their book a range of new ideas
and an excellent critical review of older ones. I found their “integrative model of
friendship,” which incorporates both sociological and psychological principles,
particularly illuminating. Their chapter on the history of friendship and friendship
research serves as an excellent way to contextualize the work of other friendship
scholars.
In 1997, Kathy Werking published We’re Just Good Friends: Women and Men in
NonRomantic Relationships. Her work is the first and in some ways the best academic
analysis of other- sex friendships that has appeared in book form. As suggested by
the title, her work focuses almost exclusively on nonromantic friendships between
women and men, though throughout the book she juxtaposes other- sex friendships
with same- sex ones. Based on qualitative interviews, she artfully dissects the chal-
lenges faced by men and women in nonromantic friendships.
Five years after Werking’s excellent book, my own book on other- sex friendships
was released: Women and Men as Friends: Relationships Across the Life Span in the
21st Century (2002). A developmental approach was taken, examining other- sex
friendships “from the cradle to the grave.” There are chapters on each of the major
stages of the life cycle, and each chapter explores the same three themes. One theme
focuses on generic and unique benefits of other- sex friends; one examines the social
and structural barriers to other- sex friendship; and the final theme describes how
communication with other- sex friends impacts a person’s evolving sense of self.
In 2009, William Rawlins released his second book on friendship, The Compass
of Friendship: Narratives, Identities, and Dialogues (see also, Rawlins, 1992). Justice
to Rawlins’s book cannot be accomplished in just a few brief sentences. Professor
Rawlins has established himself as a leading scholar in friendship, a reputation dat-
ing back over 33 years (Rawlins, 1982). As was true with his first book, Friendship
Matters: Communication, Dialectics, and the Life Course (1992), Rawlins masterfully
imposes a communication- based perspective on the intriguing and complicated
dynamics of both same- sex and other- sex friendships and has intriguing chapters
on cross- race friendships and the ethical and political potentials of friendship.
The last book for examination, Odd Couples: Friendships at the Intersection of
Gender and Sexual Orientation, was written by Ann Muraco and released in 2012.
Muraco uses feminist intersectional theory (Crenshaw, 1989), and qualitative
interviews to uncover the wonderful richness of the friendships between gay men
and straight women and straight men and lesbians. This book is important because