Friendship and Romance 119imagine secure individuals focusing quite heavily on friendship needs, relative to
their avoidant or anxious counterparts. Future research aimed at understanding
how people with differing attachment styles plan and approach need fulfillment
within their relationships would be beneficial to understanding the processes
through which individuals with different attachment styles obtain different levels of
outcomes from their relationship, as well as why some individuals choose to fulfill
particular needs with their relationships.
One final area for future research to explore related to the importance and value of
friendship within a romance is the issue of reverse- causality. Whereas it is true that shar-
ing friendship with a partner leads to positive relationship outcomes, it may also be the
case that having a high- quality romance leads to viewing one’s partner as a friend. Even
if this is the case, such a caveat does not diminish the import of friendship to romance,
but instead highlights the centrality of friendship to romantic outcomes. Nevertheless,
it is worth examining this potential pattern of mutual cyclical growth (i.e., investing in
the friendship leads to a high- quality relationship, which in turn leads to investing more
in the friendship; e.g., Wieselquist, Rusbult, Foster, & Agnew, 1999).
Conclusion
The subjective experience of a relationship reflects how well the involved partners
fulfill each other’s needs, including companionate needs, sexual needs, needs for
security and caregiving, and self- focused needs such as self- improvement and self-
expansion (Rusbult & Van Lange, 2003; VanderDrift & Agnew, 2012). Which
needs individuals choose to fulfill via their romantic relationship, coupled with their
romantic partner’s ability and willingness to meet those needs, have considerable
implications for relationship outcomes (Drigotas & Rusbult, 1992; Le & Agnew,
2001). In this chapter, we summarized research suggesting that there are strong
positive outcomes uniquely associated with romantic partners meeting friendship
needs (VanderDrift et al., 2013). There are beneficial outcomes for both the indi-
vidual and the relationship when partners meet each other’s friendship needs, as
well as deleterious consequences of lacking friendship in romance. Taken together,
the research summarized here suggests that friendship is indeed at the core of a suc-
cessful, satisfying romantic relationship. As the nature of close relationships contin-
ues to evolve, we look forward to future research in this important area.
References
Agnew, C. R. (Ed.). (2014). Social influences on close relationships: Beyond the dyad. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Agnew, C. R ., & Le, B. (2015). Prosocial behavior in close relationships: An interdependence
approach. In W. G. Graziano & D. Schneider (Eds.), Oxford handbook of prosocial behavior
(pp. 362– 375). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.