Friends Constructing Friendship: a Discourse Analysis

Home , Romantic friendship

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Friends Constructing Friendship:

A Discourse Analysis

Courtney Chasin

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-494-44579-2

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

The undersigned certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate

Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled “Friends Constructing Friendship: A Discourse

Analysis” by Courtney Chasin in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Masters of Science.

______Supervisor, Dr. H. Lorraine Radtke, Department of Psychology

______Dr. Hendrikus Stam, Department of Psychology

______Dr. Susan Boon, Department of Psychology

______Dr. Gillian Ranson, Department of Sociology

______

Date

Abstract

Twelve pairs of young adult friends were interviewed about friendship, and the transcripts analysed using discourse analysis. In their accounts, participants constructed versions of friendship (e.g., friends not having ulterior motives for their friendship) in many ways, while managing their own moral accountability. They also engaged in significant conversational work in order to construct friendship and romance as distinct relationship categories, addressing issues of sexual attraction and desire between friends, and partners. In doing so, they positioned themselves morally, drawing on the presumption of heterosexuality and the prescription of monogamy in romantic partnerships. At times (i.e., friend moments), participants performed their friendship by addressing each other directly and drawing on locally shared resources. They positioned themselves as insiders (i.e., friends), supported by the interviewer taking up a subject position as an outsider. Implications discussed include approaching friendship as an interaction, and the position of “friend” as meaningful and morally relevant.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my thesis supervisor L. Radtke for her guidance and insight. She taught me more than I could ever express, and without once saying “I told you so.”

I would also like to thank H. Stam for his input, and for revealing the zombies in the machine. I will never again look at psychology the same way.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of my other two committee members, S. Boon and G. Ranson, as well as the efforts of everyone else who involved throughout the process.

The inspiration for this project came from two very dear friends, N. Baker who introduced me to the awesome power of discourse, and C. Milloy who let me believe I could face it head on. They both helped me discover what friendship means to me.

Dedication

I dedicate this thesis to my mother, J. DeLuzio— a strong and accomplished woman, just as her mother always was and always will be.

Table of Contents

Approval Page...... ii Abstract...... iii Acknowledgements...... iv Dedication...... v Table of Contents...... vi Epigraph...... viii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION & LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 1 Why Study Friendship?...... 1 Theorising About Friendship...... 3 Attraction in Friendship...... 6 Friendship and Romantic Relationships...... 9 Social-Cognitive Approaches ...... 11 Friendship as a Social Construction ...... 15 A Discursive Approach ...... 19 My project ...... 21

CHAPTER TWO: METHODS...... 23 Participants...... 23 Recruitment...... 24 Procedure...... 25 Analysis...... 26

CHAPTER THREE: ANALYSIS...... 28 Section One...... 28 Friend moments accomplished by drawing on local resources not shared by the interviewer, and by using first person addresses...... 28 The importance of the interview context in friend moments, and the violations of interviewer and participant subject positions...... 36 Friend moments and safety within the interview context...... 44 Resistance facing an interviewer trying to understand the inside world of friends...... 50 Conclusion...... 54 Section Two...... 55 Distinguishing between friendship and romantic partnership...... 55 Friendship as lacking something special, and the privileging of romantic partnerships...... 61 Managing attraction in friendship...... 65 Moral proscription against ulterior motives underlying friendship...... 69 Moral positioning around friendships that include sexual behaviour between friends...... 74 Conclusion...... 78

CHAPTER FOUR: DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS...... 79 The Relational Performance of Friendship ...... 79 Usefulness of the Research Interview ...... 81 Friendship as Morally Relevant ...... 84 Sexual Desire and Behaviour, and the Distinction Between Friend and Partner...... 86 Privileging Romantic Partnerships Over Friendships ...... 88 Scope and Limitations of My Project...... 89 Future Directions...... 93 Asexuality and the discursive landscape of friendship...... 94 Polyamory, and monogamy as a moral resource in the distinction between friend and partner...... 96 The implications of these alternative subject positions...... 97 Conclusions...... 98

REFERENCES ...... 100

APPENDIX A: RPS ONLINE RECRUITMENT POSTING ...... 110

APPENDIX B: RECRUITMENT POSTER...... 111

APPENDIX C: RECRUITMENT HANDBILL ...... 112

APPENDIX D: INTRODUCTORY INFORMATION ...... 113

APPENDIX E: CONSENT FORM ...... 114

APPENDIX F: INTRODUCTION ...... 116

APPENDIX G: CONVERSATION GUIDE ...... 117

APPENDIX H : LETTER OF INFORMATION...... 118

APPENDIX I: TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS ...... 120

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Epigraph

There are passionate friendships that border on what we call love. The boundaries are not clearly defined. Nonetheless, love is something else.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, Weaving Friendship

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1 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION & LITERATURE REVIEW

Why Study Friendship?

Friendship pervades popular ideas about the social world and is a normative aspect of social life. Most people have had the experience of being and having a friend; friendship is most definitely part of the social world in which young adults live. As a seemingly mundane phenomenon, researchers have largely overlooked friendship after childhood (Fehr, 2000); however, it has been subsumed indirectly in other types of investigation, such as the study of peer groups, and more importantly the study of support networks and social support. Yet, as a normative experience with the potential to impact profoundly the social and psychological lives of the people involved, friendship among young adults should not be dismissed as prosaic, but instead investigated until it is thoroughly understood. In older children and adolescents, friendship has been associated with positive psychological well being and behaviour (e.g., Crosnoe & Needham, 2004; Hartup & Abecassis, 2002), affecting, for example, self-esteem, performance in social and academic tasks (e.g., Newgent, Min Lee & Daniel, 2007; Tarrant, MacKenzie & Hewitt, 2006), and even delinquency and alcohol consumption (e.g., De Kemp, Scholte, Overbeek, & Engles, 2006; Steglich, Snijders & West, 2006). Furthermore, friendships during youth have implications for social and psychological life later in adulthood, for instance, being associated with feelings of self-worth, family attitudes, and the absence of depression in adulthood (e.g., Hartup & Abecassis, 2002). Similarly, researchers have also studied the impact of late adolescent friendships on stable partnerships later on (e.g., Stocker & Richmond, 2007), reaching well into adulthood (e.g., Hartup & Abecassis, 2002; Möller & Stattin, 2001). Moreover, close personal relationships (i.e., friendships and romantic relationships) are considered crucial for the formation of personal identity (e.g., Collins & van Dulmen, 2005). Nevertheless, variability in the qualities defined as friendship and the absence of theories of friendship hinder these investigations. Lacking a coherent theory of friendship, researchers are unable to establish what aspects of friendship are related to the

2 phenomenon of interest, whether that is something like success in romantic partnership or psychological resilience. For the most part, researchers measure specific constructs associated with individuals, focusing on whether individuals who are friends show evidence of similar (or dissimilar) personal characteristics. There is little investigation of characteristics of friendships as relationships, or of participants’ understandings of their own (or any) friendship. Therefore, continued investigation into the topic of friendship is warranted. In this chapter, I review a range of literature pertaining to friendship, and to attraction and romantic relationships as they concern friendship. I also draw on the social constructionist and discursive literatures in order to ground my critique. This is not intended to provide a comprehensive review of all friendship-related research, (or love- related research for that matter). Instead, this literature review is intended to isolate a particular problem in the way close personal relationships are conceptualised and studied in mainstream social psychology, and to justify a particular solution. Throughout, I will be presenting an argument in favour of adopting a social constructionist perspective toward friendship, attempting to illustrate a need for research that neither imposes a specific role in friendship for gender, sexual orientation and sexual and romantic attraction, nor demands a fundamental distinction between conventional friends and romantic partners. I will offer a rationale for a discursive project exploring close friendship in young adults of all genders and sexual orientations. Below, I will address the lack of a coherent theory of friendship, and the reliance of the current literature on popular conceptions of friendship. I will then discuss attraction in friendship, as this illustrates researchers’ implicit assumptions about gender and sexual orientation in friendship; succeeded by an exploration of how researchers manage conceptual and empirical similarities between accounts of friendship and romantic relationships. Next, I will consider social-cognitive approaches and the problems arising from the classification of relationships into types; followed by the examination of friendship as a social construction as opposed to a stable, objective construct waiting for study. Finally, I will offer a discursive alternative to the study of friendship, grounded in social constructionism.

3 Theorising About Friendship

Although popular notions of friendship abound, psychologists lack a theory of friendship. A few studies in the 1980s attempted to clarify the construct of friendship, focusing on defining characteristics (e.g., “goodness”, “enjoyableness” and “utility”, in Bukowski, Nappi & Hoza, 1987; and “trust” and “loyalty”, in Sharabany, Gershoni & Hofman, 1981). However, neither researchers’ nor participants’ interpretations of these concepts were ever investigated. Indeed, while the participants were asked to rate the levels of such qualities in their friendships, the researchers never defined the features for the participants. Consequently, it is unclear what the participants meant by their friendship ratings, and even less clear what researchers can conclude about friendship based on them. In a more philosophical exploration of friendship, Badhar (1987) argued that friendship is a practical and emotional relationship of mutual and equal goodwill, affection and pleasure; yet, how people practicing friendship might take this up remains unexplored. While many researchers apply findings from friendship studies to support various theoretical frameworks (e.g., reinforcement theory, social exchange and equity theory, cognitive consistency, and so on, Fehr, 2000), this theoretical work has very little to do with developing a theory of friendship. For instance, showing that friends tend to have similar beliefs, and therefore that friendship supports the theory of cognitive consistency, sheds little light on what friendship is or how friendship relationships fit into the lives of friends. More commonly, theories about the nature of friendship are proposed as after- thoughts in empirical research on friendship, thereby begging the question regarding what was actually studied (Beneson & Christakos, 2003). For instance, Levy (2005, pp. 219) questioned the association of certain types of friendship with femininity: “I have argued that friendship includes simultaneous mutual significance and a willingness to and propensity for emotional expressiveness in many forms. Rather than define this type of friendship as feminine, I argue that it is friendship itself.” Not only is the common presumption of friendship as an inherently gendered construct still up for debate, more

4 importantly, so is the nature of friendship itself. Without a coherent theory (or a solid definition), “finding”, studying, and understanding friendship becomes problematic. Researchers may continue to investigate the elusive entity, but they run the risk of relying implicitly on popular notions of friendship in order to locate friendships and decide what features merit investigation. Without first making explicit these folk understandings, researchers may employ different definitions in their inquiries without realising this, and thus face problems communicating and integrating their findings (i.e., researchers may end up talking about apples and oranges, calling them all bananas). However, there are larger theoretical problems with psychologists relying on implicit cultural notions to guide their study of friendship; and to explore them, I will turn to Gergen’s classic critique of social psychology as documenting a type of social history. In mainstream social psychology, researchers decide a priori (based ultimately on culturally informed intuitions, in this case about friendship) which particular features of a subject should be studied / measured / catalogued, and in doing so, limit themselves to discoveries related to these particular features (Gergen, 1973). For instance, designing a study of friendship, using a scale measuring say trust and enjoyableness, is bound to engender results pertaining to trust and enjoyableness, regardless of what might be happening in the friendship being studied. Through this process, researchers are limited to “discovering” friendship strictly in terms of what they already know, and their resulting knowledge of friendship will only change as popular notions of friendship shift (Gergen, 1973). Importantly, the knowledge researchers produce can and does affect their subject matter (Shotter, 1992). For instance, people can react to research results (e.g., that people in lower socio-economic groups seem to have fewer friends from different ethnic and racial backgrounds [which would promote personal growth and equality], associated with less access to non-religious social groups, Briggs, 2007) by changing their own behaviour (e.g., promoting community centres that bring people of different backgrounds together), and thereby making the initial results no longer true. People can therefore change the ways they represent their relationships in conversations, and also themselves based on their conversations about friendship (Martin & Sugarmann, 2001). For example, an

5 acquaintance who is introduced to my best friend will likely act differently than when introduced to another of my acquaintances; and a conversation between two friends about how their relationship is very strange might contribute to their becoming even less conventional in their friendship. Moreover, researchers themselves are not outsiders to the socio-cultural context of their participants, but instead, share similar folk understandings of their social worlds with their participants, and are equally subject to change themselves and their relationships based on their research findings (Shotter, 1992). Consequently, researchers must take into account that they are not objective “outsiders” looking into their subject matter as is the convention in mainstream social psychology, but instead are immersed within it. However, even if researchers can draw on the same “common-sense” notions as their participants, there is no guarantee (or even reason to believe) that folk understandings of friendship will all be consistent with each other. In fact, because conventional research results reflect particular versions of friendship, which are themselves socially, culturally and historically contingent (Richardson & Woolfolk, 1994), they are therefore ultimately subject to change with cultural shifts in the meaning of friendship. Even identity and selfhood are not separable from sociocultural factors (Okazaki, David & Abelmann, 2008), and so any sense of self within friendship must also be inextricable from cultural discourses. Yet, older discourses do not disappear (Taylor, 2001a), and different cultures produce different discourses. Accordingly, when studying societies that differ widely from each other, researchers should expect to generate different knowledge about friendship. Significantly, these differences are ontological (Shotter, 1992), meaning that the reality of such constructs (i.e., friendship) depends upon (and therefore is likely to differ according to) the society producing it. Consequently, in predicating their research on popular friendship notions, and generating a corpus of empirical findings, mainstream social psychologists risk reifying multiple, competing versions of friendship. As Harré (2002) noted:

6 There surely are many interpretations of some given sequence of actions [or in the case of friendship, category of relationships], identified as individuated by some commonly agreed criteria. However, one of these will be dominant in the interpretation […]. This will be the social/psychological reality. There is nothing else to which this story might or might not correspond. The social scientist or psychologist who notes down the dominant story-line has the truth of the matter. (p.622, note added)

Mainstream social psychologists, when they investigate friendship based on implicit popular notions, are therefore creating a historical characterisation of the dominant “common-sense” understandings of friendship (Gergen, 1973). While there is nothing wrong with this as an intellectual project, there are undoubtedly more effective ways to generate a history of friendship than to employ the tools of mainstream social psychology: psychologists are not historians, nor do they (presumably) wish to be. It is therefore desirable for the study of friendship either to avoid implicitly relying on popular ideas of friendship, or to explore directly people’s understandings of friendship and the role of friendship in their lives. Attraction in Friendship

The study of attraction in friendship renders particularly visible the impact of grounding psychological inquiry in implicit “common-sense” assumptions, as discussed above. To begin, romantic attraction has been characterised as heightened emotionality, preoccupation with the other, and a persistent desire to be near the other; while sexual attraction involves elements of sexual arousal, sexual fantasies and desire for sexual behaviour (Diamond, 2000). A person may experience non-sexual romantic attraction, sexual attraction in the absence of romantic feelings, or attraction that is both romantic and sexual as is typically assumed in the case of intimate partners. Furthermore, researchers often design their studies around the presumption that romantic and sexual attraction commonly (and only) occur in cross-gender friendship, seeking to measure the impact of these attractions on cross-gender friendships (e.g., DeLucia-Waack, Gerrity, Taub & Baldo, 2001; Guerrero & Chavez, 2005); and studying intimacy in same-gender friendship while ignoring the possibility of such attractions within this context (e.g., Fehr, 2004; Sharabany, Eshel & Hakim, 2008).

7 While such studies typically offer evidence of romantic or sexual attraction in cross-gender friendship, concluding that these attractions are characteristic of cross- gender friendship bears further scrutiny. For instance, evidence suggests an impact of cultural and social factors on attraction in cross-gender friendship, implying that these attractions are socially constructed, at least to some degree. White American men, for example, report more sexual attraction to cross-gender friends than White American women, while African American men and women report similar levels of attraction (Kaplan & Keys, 1997). Similarly, cultural and social factors are known to affect the age at which teenagers begin dating and the types of behaviours they engage in when they do, and both of these are related to cross-gender friendship in adolescence (Felman, 1999; Meschke & Silbereisen, 1997). However, whether heterosexual romantic interest accounts for this connection, as Meschke and Silbereisen suggest, remains less clear. Although sexual attraction has been the major focus of cross-gender friendship research, it has been absent from the study of same-gender friendship (Kaplan & Keys, 1997). There is no inherent reason to believe that romantic or sexual attraction does not occur in same-gender friendship, suggesting that this oversight reflects an underlying presumption of heterosexuality. As a result, researchers have produced substantial evidence of romantic and sexual attraction in cross-gender friendship, but little evidence of such attraction in same-gender friendship. However, instead of investigating the possibility of these types of attraction in same-gender friendship, researchers assume that same-gender and cross-gender friendships are fundamentally different (i.e., cross-gender friendship is special / difficult / exciting because it is the site of romantic attractions, while same-gender friendship is not), and deploy (heterosexual) sexual orientation to account for this difference (e.g., DeLucia-Waack, Gerrity, Taub & Baldo, 2001; Guerrero & Chavez, 2005; Meschke & Silbereisen, 1997). Not only is this implied from the one- sided approach to attraction in friendship, it is also evident in the theories which refer to budding sexuality to explain the normative increase in number and intimacy of cross- gender friendships during adolescence (Collins, 2003; Diamond & Dubé, 2002; Kuttler & La Greca, 2004; Sharabany, Gershoni & Hofman, 1981).

8 Recently, when asking about these attractions specifically, researchers have reported same-gender attractions in the friendships of heterosexual people. For instance, some heterosexual people report non-sexual, same-gender romantic desires or attractions, while many others report same-gender sexual attractions or desires that never become romantic (Diamond, 2003). Similarly, heterosexual people may experience highly intimate, though primarily non-sexual relationships that are situated ambiguously between friend and romantic partner. A good example would be the passionate friendships studied by Diamond (2000), which are characterised by their intensity and exclusivity as well as the devotion and physical affection shared between friends, while lacking a sexual component. Notably, the people involved in these relationships did not consider them to be romantic partnerships, either while still involved in the relationship or retrospectively. Diamond (2003) also cited historical references to “romantic friendships” and intense, same-gender crushes called “smashes” to suggest that same- gender attraction within friendship is not a new idea. Interestingly, these relationships have primarily involved women, heterosexual and otherwise (Diamond, 2003). Although one study reported that the difference between “friend” and “lover” is often unclear within lesbian circles (Weinstock, 2004), friendship research has largely ignored people who are not heterosexual, so same-gender attractions of sexual minority people, and other friendship variations, have not been thoroughly investigated. As Fine (2002) has powerfully noted, it is important for psychology to seek out those who are generally absent because they are marginalised, such as sexual minority individuals, so that they might be included in future research, lest psychology contribute to their further marginalisation. As I noted earlier, the normative increased prevalence and intensity of cross- gender friendship throughout adolescence is often attributed to budding sexuality, and consequently, romantic and sexual attractions. This, however, cannot explain why sexual minority adolescents, regardless of gender, reported having more close female friends than their heterosexual peers (Diamond & Dubé, 2002). In addition, sexual minority boys reported being more attached to their best friend (regardless of gender) but less attached to their romantic partner than did heterosexual boys. Clearly, the increased salience of

9 sexuality typically assumed to underlie the developmental shift toward more cross- gender friendship in adolescence (e.g., Chung & McBride-Chang, 2007; Poulin & Pederson, 2007; Sharabany, Eshel & Hakim, 2008) cannot account for these relational patterns. To explain their results, Diamond and Dubé (2002) posited that sexual minority boys compensated for low expectations of intimacy with a male partner by becoming more attached to their friends. This explanation foregrounds the culturally constructed presumptions about romantic intimacy between two boys. Indeed, the researchers suggested that these boys have low expectations of their same-gender romantic relationships due to gender stereotypes. To explore this type of theory, it is important to investigate how the categories of friend and partner are created through accounts of friendship and attachment, and the implications of these categories for experience in a social context ripe with stereotypes. Friendship and Romantic Relationships

As may be particularly evident when considering attraction in cross-gender friendship, friendships and romantic partnerships (otherwise referred to as “love relationships” or “couple relationships”) are often treated as similar, with friendship being simply a less intense analogue of love. In fact, Bank (1995) argues that friendship’s assumed similarity to love underlies researchers’ comparative neglect of friendship, with some researchers suggesting that both researchers and participants themselves may have some difficulty distinguishing between cross-gender friendship and (heterosexual) romantic relationships (e.g., Collins & van Dulmen, 2005). In particular, companionate love (Gonzaga, Keltern, Londahl & Smith, 2001; Grote & Frieze, 1994) bears remarkable resemblance to popular understandings of good friendship. The concepts of friendship, defined as friends loving each other and wishing each other well for the sake of friendship (Badhar, 1987), and companionate love, defined as affection felt between people whose lives are “deeply intertwined” (Gonzaga, et al., 2001, p.248) logically both could apply to either a close friendship or a romantic relationship. Reinforcing the similarity between these two types of relationships, Grote and Frieze (1994) proposed the hybrid label “Friendship-based Love”. Nevertheless, companionate love is often assumed to have or have had some sexual component, at least insofar as it is studied in the context

10 of couple relationships but not in the context of conventional (i.e., non-romantic and non-sexual) friendship. Other researchers assume that there is a distinction between friendship and romantic relationships. Kaplan and Keys (1997), for instance, in selecting a research sample, forced the distinction by specifying that a participant’s closest cross-gender friend and closest romantic partner must not be the same person. Meanwhile, Gonzaga et al. (2001) managed reports of emotional intensity by posing questions about “love” to college-aged heterosexual couples and substituting “liking” into the same questions posed to cross-gender high school-aged best friend pairs. Although the researchers reported that best friend pairs and couples managed commitment in similar ways, they argued that couples’ experiences of affection carried more significance than that of friends, because the couples referred to the more intense experience of love, while the friend pairs referred to the less intense experience of liking, without referring to how they posed different questions to friend pairs and to couples. This assumed difference is also reflected in some researchers’ interpretations of their study’s results. For instance, Aron, Dutton, Aron and Iverson (1989) interviewed couples and friend pairs about their experiences of falling in love or falling in friendship. Although the accounts of falling into a relationship were all very similar, regardless of whether this was a friendship or a love relationship — both invoked the partners’ perceived similarity and reciprocal liking as the most important factors — the researchers’ discussion emphasized the small differences in the relative importance of the various contributing factors. Similarly, the researchers speculated that some stereotypical features of the experience of falling in love, like feelings of dizziness, might have been omitted from participants’ accounts because they seemed foolish in retrospect or inappropriate for a laboratory setting. However, the absence of these features from accounts of falling in friendship was never questioned. Notably, the researchers deployed explanations that treated participants’ stories as constructed in order to create an account of how initiations of friendship and initiations of romantic relationships are different. They never questioned their presumption that falling- in-friendship and falling-in-love experiences should have two different types of accounts.

11 Instead, they fashioned versions of these stories to avoid challenging this assumption (as well as the relevance of their own conceptual categories of friendship and love) in response to the unexpected homogeneity of accounts. Yet, the researchers only found this manipulation necessary, because they initially treated the participants’ very similar stories of falling in love and falling in friendship as transparent descriptions. Instead of theorizing retrospectively about discursive functions served by the parts of participants’ narratives which contradicted researchers’ expectations, it would be more useful to treat these stories as constructed accounts from the outset. Researchers are not the only ones constructing a difference between romantic relationships and friendship: participants do it too. When asked about their predicted emotional reactions to acts hypothetically performed either by a friend or a romantic partner, participants’ responses differed according to the type of relationship (Fehr & Harasymchuk, 2005). Fehr and Harasymchuk (2005) noted that participants seemed to place heightened importance on romantic partners as compared to friends. However, as no friends or romantic partners of the participants were involved, participants’ descriptions of their emotional reactions remain hypothetical. Adopting a social constructionist perspective focuses attention on how and when participants construct their relationships as more or less important, instead of assuming that relationship importance dictates emotional reactions. Social-Cognitive Approaches

The distinction between friendship and romantic partnership is prevalent throughout the social psychological study of close personal relationships. Prototype theory and attachment theory both address close personal relationships in social- cognitive, non-constructionist ways, and deal with the conventional psychological categories of friendship and love relationships. The first point of this section is to illustrate how social-cognitive approaches logically permit the existence of non- normative relationships (i.e., relationships that cannot neatly be classified into either the typical friendship or love relationship). The second purpose is to discuss the social- cognitive view of the distinctions between different types of relationships, and the shortcomings of this perspective.

12 Prototype relationship theory recognises a certain ambiguity between friendship and love relationships (Aron & Westbay, 1996; Fehr & Russell, 1991), if only because as prototypes, the categories of love and friendship, have no clear boundaries. Similarly, a prototype model of friendship may focus on elements such as intimacy and emotional support (Fehr, 2004), which could apply equally well to love relationships. Fehr’s analysis implicitly presumed a version of friendship uncomplicated by romantic and sexual attractions as her investigation focused on heterosexual, same-sex friend pairs (precisely because self-identified heterosexual people are assumed not to experience romantic or sexual attraction for members of their own sex). Through her choice of same- sex pairs of heterosexual friends, her analysis focused on prototypes of love and friendship, which are as distinct as possible. However, prototypes inherently have fuzzy borders, with the classic example of the cup and mug: prototypical cups and mugs can be identified, but there is no clear point at which a cup-like mug ceases to be a mug and becomes a mug-like cup. This means that while a close personal relationship can be judged in relation to the prototype for love or the prototype for friendship, there may be some relationships for which this classification is genuinely ambiguous, unclear, or perhaps even inappropriate in the case of a relationship that is neither a friendship nor a romantic partnership. Attachment theory, which has been used to account for close personal relationships in adulthood, refers to prototypical partner and friend relationships (Hazan & Shaver, 1994). The categories of “friend” and “romantic partner” are treated as unproblematic when investigating, for instance, how attachment changes during early adulthood, as the primary attachment figure changes from a parent to a friend or partner (Fraley & Davis, 1997); and how the primary attachment in adult relationships is usually a romantic partner (Hazan & Shaver, 1994). What is important, however, is not simply that the category boundaries are diffuse by virtue of their being represented by prototypes, but more importantly, that there is no theoretical reason why a primary attachment figure in adulthood must be a romantic partner. Not only is it theoretically possible for individuals to engage in non-normative relationships falling outside the traditional categories of friendship and romantic partnership, but it is also possible for

13 such relationships to be the primary attachment in adulthood. Notably, even in social psychological theories that are not constructionist, there is no reason to assume a single, normative outcome of close relationships in adulthood, namely the monogamous, (hetero)sexual romantic partnership. Any non-normative relationships, likely to be a minority, are probably dwarfed in number by more conventional relationships and therefore rendered invisible in standard, quantitative research. Nevertheless, should such relationships be discovered through qualitative inquiry, it is important to ensure that theories of close personal relationships avoid defining such relationships as impossible. Excluding these types of relationships from theory and investigation could ultimately lead to practitioners denying their importance in the lives of people who engage in them, or even to pathologising these relationships based on their departure from an established norm. When considering the possibility of non-normative relationships, classifications of friendship and love seem relatively straightforward; nevertheless, the application of these categories is widely variable, and researchers using prototype theory draw upon context to explain how the use of prototypes varies among individuals. For instance, Fehr and Russell (1991) argued that most participants agreed with statements such as “infatuation is a type of love” while also declaring statements like “infatuation is a type of fruit” to be false, because this is what made sense in the given context. They argued further that these ratings cannot be used as evidence that infatuation is actually a type of love: this is analogous to suggesting that a participant labeling an object a “cup” when other options include, say, a typewriter, should not be taken as evidence that the object is a cup instead of a mug. It is irrelevant, for my purposes, whether infatuation is truly a form of love, and what participants need to say about infatuation to allow prototype theorists to be able to make claims about whether infatuation is a form of love. The relevant point is that while presenting arguments about when they can and cannot make claims about actual categorisation, prototype theorists refer to the context of participants’ categorisations and the (discursive) purposes they serve. Clearly, as Fehr and Russell (1991) pointed out, participant responses to questions about close personal relationships are situated in a particular context and serve a

14 particular purpose. As noted by Potter and Wetherell (1987), most instances of categorisation occur in conversation, and not when faced with actual instances of the to- be categorised thing. We may ask someone to pass a cup or show a friend our new mug, but we rarely open a cupboard and declare “this is a mug” and “this is a cup.” Specifically, people talk about friendship, romance and love every day in their normal conversations with other people. The meanings of these categories and the relationships to which they refer are constructed in everyday conversation, and change from one conversational context to the next. It therefore makes sense to treat the categorisation of relationships into friendship and romantic partnership discursively, or as a matter of language in use. Moreover, unlike a beverage container which does not change shape upon being labelled either a cup or a mug, a relationship may be affected by the act of labelling it, and the terms used to describe it (Bradac, 1983). For instance, labelling a relationship a “brother-sister” relationship might prevent future romantic interests from being expressed or explored (Abraham, 2002). In addition, researchers continue to be faced with relationships that do not fit the categories they have developed, such as “friends with benefits” relationships, which are perhaps best described as relationships in which friends engage in casual sexual behaviour with each other, but are not romantically involved. This diversity of close personal relationships is problematic for accounts that treat friendship and romantic partnerships as distinct categories. Although researchers continue to develop more typologies and classifications of personal relationships (such as “friends with benefits” relationships and “passionate friendships”), creating a new relationship category does not solve the problem. For instance, researchers cannot agree whether “friends with benefits” relationships represent a temporary phase confused people may go through while navigating the normative binary opposition of friendship and romantic relationships, or a completely separate relationship category. Giordano, Manning, and Longmore (2006), for example, have proposed that this type of relationship could be how some people transition between romance and friendship in either direction, and that the nature of these relationships may be unclear even to the people involved; while Hughes, Morrison and

15 Asada (2005) argued that these relationships may actually be associated with well- defined, relationship-specific rules. Creating a new category with which to classify relationships does not begin to address the conceptual problem researchers face. Moreover, even though researchers have been troubled by the conceptual challenge of making sense of relationships that appear to fall outside the neat, traditional categories of friend and romantic partner, there is no reason to assume that non-researchers face this same problem or react similarly. Indeed, whether troubled or not, people seem to successfully negotiate a range of non- normative social relationships from “friends with benefits” to “passionate friendships”. Investigating how people accomplish these relationships socially, and what it is they are doing as they do so, could help researchers understand what people face as problems in their personal relationships, without researchers imposing their conceptual quandaries onto participants’ experience. More generally, some social psychologists, including prototype theorists, turn to constructionist-like explanations to account for the variability in how the categories of friend and romantic partner are applied; hence social constructionism itself may be useful for addressing the diversity of close personal relationships discussed above — a diversity which has not been discounted on theoretical grounds. Friendship as a Social Construction

As noted above, many researchers are beginning to talk about friendship, romantic relationships and attraction in implicitly constructionist ways when designing their research or when trying to explain select patterns of results. One further example can be found in Brown (2006), who proposed that studied friendships, like studied romantic relationships, ought to involve agreement between both partners about the nature of the relationship, as non-reciprocal reports of friendship are just as frequent as non-reciprocal reports of romance— possibly over 40% of the reported close friendships of adolescents ages 14-20 (Ciairano, Rabaglietti, Roggero, Bonino & Byers, 2007). This standard acknowledges that the meaning of personal relationships is socially negotiated and is consistent with the idea that people construct their social realities.

16 In addition, some researchers invoke social and cultural constructions more specifically: Fehr and Russell (1991) noted the historical, cultural and linguistic contingency of the North American, English-speaking world’s construct of love; Aron et al. (1989) discussed how accounts, like the falling-in-love stories they collected, differ according to context and the way participants might be attempting to portray themselves; Hendrick and Hendrick (1993) argued that the researcher should use freeform methodologies, noting that allowing self-identified lovers to speak freely resulted in many declarations and constructions of the partner as a best friend that would otherwise have gone unnoticed; Sternberg, Hojjat, and Barnes (2001) argued that love itself is a story and should be approached as such; and Aleman (2005) interpreted the online message board discussions of older women on the subject of romance as evidence of their resisting hegemonic masculinity in constructing themselves as independent women who take joy in life, despite wanting heterosexual companionship. Notably, non- constructionist researchers are themselves recognising the socially constructed nature of friendship and love relationships, albeit in limited ways. Although such arguments appear sporadically within the friendship and love relationship literature, together they point to the potential usefulness of adopting an explicitly social constructionist approach to fill the existing gaps in our understanding of friendship. Beyond reproducing “common-sense” understandings about friendship by relying on implicit popular notions of friendship to begin with (e.g., that attraction is a factor in cross-gender but not same-gender relationships), critiques and critical histories of psychology have problematised the way psychologists generally reify the psychological objects they construct, while noting that all of these objects are inextricably embedded in the social and historical context of the psychologists creating them (Danzinger, 1994; Stam, 2003). For example, many of the documented gender-based friendship differences (e.g., men’s friendship as aggressive and instrumental, and women’s friendship as expressive) may result either directly or indirectly from investigators’ own definitions and research practices. For instance, after using expressiveness as a measure of femininity, Williams (1985) reported that femininity was positively associated with intimacy in friendship. She

17 then discussed the implications of sex-role expectations for men’s and women’s friendships, without questioning the association of femininity with expressiveness. Furthermore, cultural and cross-cultural studies of friendship and gender reveal an inconsistency in gender-based friendship differences that are incompatible with friendship being an inherently gendered type of relationship. For example, many of the gender differences noted in the study of same-gender friendship in North America, such as expressed love for a friend and level of disclosure, are simply absent elsewhere, in India, for instance (Berman, Murphy-Berman & Pachauri, 1988). More recently, when studying the friendships of adult men and women, Bank (1995) noted the impact of researchers’ definitions and measures of constructs such as “expression”, “aggression” and “instrumentality”. Concluding that men’s friendships are no more instrumental than women’s friendships, and that women’s friendships are only more expressive than men’s friendships when expressiveness is defined very narrowly, Bank argued that researchers themselves are primarily responsible for the notoriously pervasive friendship gender differences. Similar to how researchers have sought romantic attraction in cross-gender friendships (and found it) while ignoring such attraction elsewhere; they have focused largely on friendship differences which fall along gender lines, even when those differences are largely created by the way they chose to define their terms. Indeed, researchers construct friendship as gendered through the operational definitions they deploy and the questions they pose. Continuing to focus on gender-based differences in friendship perpetuates gender stereotypes throughout the friendship literature. However, even disregarding the potential social harm such stereotypes might themselves engender, this type of research is still theoretically problematic because it inevitably labels women as “masculine” and men as “feminine”, when they deviate from prescribed gender norms. For instance, if researchers (or non-researchers for that matter) identify expressiveness as a feminine characteristic, they resultantly define expressive men as feminine. Similarly, this type of investigation would commit the methodological fallacy of presuming something (i.e., friendship) to be gendered simply because a man or a woman is engaged in it. Although gender is one potentially relevant classification of people involved in friendship, there are many

18 possibilities such as age, class, job, background, sexual orientation, parental status, marital status, and so on. Framing the study of friendship around gender (and above all gender differences) is arbitrary and, without justification, defers investigation from any number of other potentially relevant questions. While men’s and women’s friendships may be reported either to differ or not differ in levels of aggression and expression, depending on how the research is performed, other results hinge upon where and on whom the research is performed. For instance, certain classes of cross-gender friendship, (e.g., the “bhai-behen” or “brother- sister” relationship), exist in India but do not exist in North America (Abraham, 2002). Also, even in North America, cultural differences have been noted, for instance, a gender difference in the level of mutual support between close friends in adolescence has been reported for White American youth but not African American youth (DuBois & Hirsch, 1990; Way & Chen, 2000). While the variability of friendship across diverse cultural contexts could easily be the focus of investigation, it is used here merely to illustrate that friendship appears not to be a stable, objective construct, but instead to be culturally contingent and socially constructed. Instead of addressing friendship as a stable, objective and “out-there” construct to be located and measured, researchers could investigate people’s performances of friendship, which are situated in conversation and created continually between individuals as they interact. This type of radical social constructionism would ultimately permit the development of new theories of friendship that are neither dependent on popular theories of friendship, nor bound to reproduce them by building investigations around folk definitions and assumptions. Similarly, adopting this view permits researchers to avoid explaining friends’ interactions by simply referring to the fact that they are friends. Instead, the diversity of friendship itself and how other factors (e.g., gender and sexual orientation) may be implicated in this variability can be investigated. As an example of this, challenging the pervasive assumption that friendship is inherently gendered, as Levy (2005) has done, allows researchers to turn the question around and investigate how gender is accomplished in the context of performing friendship, in much the same way that Redman (2001) studied how older adolescent boys

19 constructed their masculinity through their accounts of their heterosexual romantic relationships. In other words, gender and friendship (and romantic relationships for that matter) are reciprocally related. The same can be said about sexual orientation and the popular assumption that friendship between a straight man and a straight woman is fundamentally different from a friendship between a straight woman and a gay man. Therefore, instead of imposing the presumably objective constructs of gender and sexual orientation as a way to account for variability in friendship, researchers could study diversity in friendship, leaving open what constrains those relationships. A Discursive Approach

As discussed previously, the study of friendship and close personal relationship has faced certain shortcomings. Significantly, investigators have deployed gender stereotypes and the idea of normative heterosexuality to explain features of close relationships. This may reflect the researchers’ own presumptions of heterosexuality and gender stereotypes rather than the everyday experience of their participants and is undoubtedly problematic for the development of psychological theory. In addition, current (underdeveloped) theories and definitions of friendship and close personal relationships exclude possible non-normative relationships when there is evidence of human relationship experience outside the categories of friend and romantic partner. Nevertheless, when faced with examples of close personal relationships that resist traditional classification, researchers tend to work up explanations that treat participants’ accounts as socially constructed. The next logical step involves adopting an explicitly social constructionist perspective and undertaking exploratory research into what participants find important about friendship and romantic relationships and how such relationships are skillfully worked up in the context of conversation. Taking a discursive approach (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) entails an investigation of how friends interact with each other instead of looking at accounts of friendship as descriptions to be compiled. This type of research can proceed without a pre-determined operational definition of “friendship” or “romantic relationship” and does not preclude any potential types or characteristics of close relationships. Therefore, it does not gloss over any non-normative relationships and does not presume systematic differences

20 associated with gender or sexual orientation. To do this, language is treated as rhetorical, argumentative and actively involved in the construction of the very concepts conventional research assumes it describes (Taylor, 2001b). Rather than using speech as a means to infer cognitions (Horton-Salway, 2001), or treating accounts transparently as a way to access some objective truth about the world (Potter, 2003c), discourse analysts explore what is done with speech (e.g., explaining, blaming, exonerating, Horton-Salway, 2001; and how speakers manage stake or interest in their accounts, Edwards & Potter, 1993). In conversations, people are accountable not only for the actions they describe in their accounts, but also for “their own actions in speaking, the veracity of their accounts, and the interactional consequences of those accounts” (Edwards & Potter, 1993, p.25). Reports themselves involve accountability of the current speaker for their actions, namely those performed during the reporting (Horton-Salway, 2001). Instead of comparing accounts with “the truth”, discourse analysis entails comparing accounts (with other accounts), in the goal of saying something about how people construct those accounts and what people do with them (Potter, 2003c). In particular, discourse analysts focus on the actions that people perform in talk, while treating language as situated conversationally, institutionally and rhetorically (Potter, 2003a). Consequently, things like the factuality of an account come to be seen as accomplishments (Horton-Salway, 2001). Because a discursive approach to language recognises discourse as a primary medium for social action (Potter, 2003b), taking this seriously also means accepting human conversation as “the primary reality” (Shotter, 1992, p.176), that is, taking social constructionism seriously too. As skillful speakers, people construct their social worlds through language, and are themselves constituted in doing so (Potter, 2003a). From the very point that we are thinking or talking about the world, we are already dealing with representations of it, composed from, expressed in, and ultimately limited to the language available to us (Edley, 2001b). Similarly, while discourse produces and sustains individual speakers as persons, it is produced by persons with other persons (Harré, 1992). This means that people’s social worlds, including their identities and relationships,

21 are constituted, through discursive actions and interactions with other people. As Butler (1990) noted: “Paradoxically, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of ‘agency’ that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed” (p.201). Extending this to relationship, friendship becomes the effect produced through a kind of active social performance. It is important to understand that performative aspects of constructionism do not imply that what is performed (e.g., identity, relationships) is in any way insincere or unreal. As Edley (2001b) pointed out, it is typically the critics of social constructionism that deny the reality of social constructions, while constructionists themselves typically claim that the constructions (those socially produced things that comprise reality) are real. After all, the whole point about the social construction of reality is that a social reality gets constructed. And so, the performative aspects of “social objects”, like friendship calls for dynamic accounts of what is produced discursively and what this means (Gergen, 1999). It is through exploring the discursive resources that people employ at the individual level during these types of performances (e.g,. the performance of friendship), and how they do so, that we come to understand how these performances work and what they mean in the context of our social psychological lives (Shotter, 1997). Consequently, for psychologists taking a discursive approach to language, the insidious pervasiveness of implicit “common-sense” understandings of social psychological constructs is not problematic. As Edwards and Stokoe (2004) explained: Rather than adopting ‘folk psychological’ ideas [about friendship, in this case] as its own constructs and explanations, or rejecting them in favour of a technically superior scientific psychology of mental life, DP [discursive psychology] sets out to investigate the ways that people ordinarily describe and account for themselves and each other. Irrespective of the philosophical or cognitive–psychological adequacy of people’s own terms of reference, those terms of reference have their own reality within the everyday accounting practices by which people actually live their lives. (p. 506, note added)

My project

In order to study friends actively engaged in performing friendship, I invited pairs of close friends to participate in a research conversation about friendship. In an attempt to

22 avoid the pervasive presumption of heterosexuality, and to avoid the further marginalisation of non-heterosexual people’s experiences, I included a range of friend pairs in an exploratory study of friendship diversity, and sought specifically to include pairs of friends with various genders and sexual orientations. Research questions to be addressed included: When and how do people construct friendship and romantic relationships (and a difference between the two) in talking about their close personal relationships? For what purposes and to what effects do they do so? How do gender, sexual and romantic attraction and sexual orientation figure into young adults’ constructions of friendship and romance?

23 CHAPTER TWO: METHODS

Participants

Twelve pairs of friends were recruited. Of these, four were cross-gender friends, four same-gender friends with participants self-identifying as female, and four were same-gender friends with participants self-identifying as male. Of the 24 participants, 18 (75%) self-identified as heterosexual or straight; four self-identified as gay, lesbian or homosexual; one self-identified as bisexual; and one self-identified as bicurious. The participants’ genders and sexual orientations within friend pairs are shown in Table 1 below. Table 1. Sexual Orientations of Participants Within Same-Gender and Cross-Gender Friend Pairs Sexual Orientation Same-gender (Female) Same-gender (Male) Cross-Gender Both Heterosexual 2 3 2 Both Gay 1 Heterosexual Woman / Gay Man or Lesbian 1 1 Heterosexual Woman / Bisexual Man or Bicurious Woman 1 1

All but one participant spoke English as a first language, and all spoke English with native or near-native competency. In terms of ethnicity, 17 participants (71%) self- identified as either Caucasian or White (one of these being Caucasian-Jewish); five of the participants (21%) self-identified as Chinese (with one of these being Filipino-Chinese); one participant self-identified only as Polish; and one self-identified only as Canadian. The ages of participants ranged from 18 to 32, with a mean age of 20 years and 11 months (SD = two years and 11 months). Both of the participants were between the ages of 18 and 25 in ten of the twelve friend-pairs, with the remaining two friends-pairs having one participant within this age range. For most of the friend pairs, both participants were

24 similar in age, with six of the pairs composed of participants reporting to be exactly the same age in years and four more reporting no more than two years age difference. Both of the friend-pairs with larger age differences were same-gender friends, one reporting an age difference of four years and the other pair of self-identified “school friends” reporting an age difference of 12 years. The mean age difference between the friends was one year and nine months (SD = three years and five months). Recruitment

Participants were recruited in three ways: through the Sona Undergraduate Research Participation System at the University of Calgary, posters displayed in strategic locations, and through word of mouth. The study was posted on the research participation system, which automatically screened participants’ pre-test responses for age and gender, making the study visible only to students eligible to participate based on these criteria. The Sona system also prevented students from signing up to participate in the study twice. While only one student could sign up for a time slot, it was made clear in the study posting that both members of the friend-pair were required to participate together in order for participation to be possible. The recruitment information and study requirements posted on the Sona system specified that participants must have been friends for at least one year prior to participating, and welcomed participants of all genders and sexual orientations (for an example, see Appendix A). All participants eligible for participation credit through the Research Participation System were granted credit in return for their participation. Ten friend-pairs were recruited through the Research Participation System, with both members of the friend-pair receiving credit for participation in eight of these cases. The recruitment poster (Appendix B) was posted in the office of GLASS (the university student club for gender and sexual diversity), and on the bulletin board at Calgary OutLink (the local community and resource centre for gender and sexual diversity). Additionally, several smaller pages containing the same information (Appendix C) were given to members of the Miscellaneous Youth Network (a grass- routes Calgary non-profit group working to provide safe queer-friendly spaces for LGBTQ youth) to distribute throughout their personal social circles. These smaller

25 information sheets were also distributed at a GLASS social event. Unfortunately, no participants were recruited this way. The final two friend-pairs were recruited more purposefully through word of mouth. A distant acquaintance of mine, whom I knew self-identified as a lesbian, agreed to participate with a friend. Because she was enrolled in a psychology course, she received credit for her participation through the psychology Research Participation System. Another acquaintance of mine mentioned my study and provided my contact information to one of his friends who was openly gay and who contacted me to arrange an interview. Procedure

Eleven of the interviews took place in the Discourse Analysis Lab at the University of Calgary and one occurred in the home of a participant. Upon arriving for the interview, the friends were asked to confirm that they had been friends for at least one year, and that at least one of them was between the age of 18 and 25, in order to verify participation eligibility. Next, I introduced myself and explained the purpose of the interview (see the script in Appendix D). Participants were then given the informed consent form (Appendix E) that provided additional information about the study, explained the tape recording procedure and gave them an opportunity to choose their pseudonyms. At this point, any of the participants’ questions were answered and written informed consent obtained. Participants then filled out a short demographic questionnaire (Appendix E), with information collected in the form of open-ended written answerer allowing participants to describe themselves in their own terms. Next, I explained (see script in Appendix F) that the participants would be presented with a conversation guide (Appendix G), which was intended to give them a point from which to begin their conversation about friendship, but that they were neither limited to the topics on the guide, nor were they required to address them all. Specifically, although this guide provided suggested topics, they were encouraged to discuss whatever they considered relevant, drawing from their own experiences. This is when participants were asked to converse mainly with each other, with my role as a facilitator to ask questions whenever clarifications or elaborations seemed appropriate.

26 We then began the recorded conversation, using both a digital recorder and an analogue recorder as a back-up. The research conversations lasted between approximately 45 minutes and one hour. After the interview conversation, participants were thanked for their participation, and given a further opportunity to ask questions or simply talk about the research project. They were given a debriefing sheet (Appendix H), and their questions were answered. The recorded conversations were later transcribed according to the conventions recommended by Potter and Wetherell (1987). These transcripts were then analysed using discourse analysis, beginning by reading the transcripts repeatedly and looking for patterns in the data. All interview passages quoted throughout this chapter have been assigned line numbers beginning with the number “one”. Some excerpts have been broken down into several smaller portions for the purposes of clarity. The line numbers of these portions continue from the last line in the previous portion, so any passages with line numbers not beginning at “one” follow from the previously quoted section. During my analysis, I refer to parts of excerpts by line number. Furthermore, in introducing each passage, I give the pseudonyms of the speaking participants. In the excerpts, the speakers are indicated by the first letter of their pseudonym, and in my case by I (for “Interviewer”). The symbols used in the passages of interview transcript are explained in the Transcription Conventions (Appendix I). Analysis

There are many varieties of discourse analysis (Potter, 2003b), but the version I adopted relies on the conceptual tools of subject positions. A speaker’s position is specified by the moral and personal attributes ascribed to them, either by themselves (i.e., they position themselves as something), or by someone else (i.e., they are positioned as something by a fellow conversationalist; Harré & Van Langenhove, 1992). Additionally, in conversation, speakers produce distinct ways of talking about something, i.e., separate versions which create repertoires of meaning (Edley, 2001a). Speakers position themselves with respect to these versions and repertoires, for instance, taking them up in their talk or resisting them. This version of discourse analysis, which has been used

27 extensively in psychology, combines both data-driven and theory-driven analyses and is inherently concerned with moral, ethical and ideological issues (Hammersley, 2003). This is contrasted with conversation analysis with its tightly data-driven analysis focusing particularly on interaction patterns in conversational exchanges, and results pertaining to conversational “practices which are common to culturally competent speakers from the same ‘natural language-speaking community’” (Taylor, 2001a, p. 312). Conversation analysis also has a uniquely strict focus on participants’ own orientations, and deals more generally with institutional realities, as they are “constituted in talk in a variety of ways as participants construct and orient to institutional goals and identities” (Potter, 1999, p. 120). In practice, however, more recent discursive psychology often borrows heavily from the conversation analytic tradition, with a focus on institutions and participants’ orientations (Potter, 1999). My analysis proceeded in two ways. First, there was a largely data-driven analysis focusing on specific conversational exchanges, attempting to isolate interaction patterns relevant to friendship. This type of analysis was possible because my participants were pairs of friends, and therefore, to the extent that friendship is something accomplished actively, moment-to-moment in social interaction, distinctive conversational patterns associated with this performance ought to be evident. Consequently, this portion of the analysis explored (if and) how participants performatively constituted their own friendship within the interview context, and how they positioned themselves and each other as friends. Second, there was an analysis focusing on subject positions and repertoires of meaning, for a combined bottom-up and top-down analysis. This second portion of my analysis sought to uncover versions of friendship in the participants’ talk and how participants employed, and related to, these versions of friendship, in constructing their meaning. This addressed gender and sexual orientation in limited ways, as participants took up related positions in their constructions of friendship, romantic partnership and the distinction between the two.

28 CHAPTER THREE: ANALYSIS

Section One of this chapter will present friend moments, where the participants’ performances of friendship were discernable from the rest of the research conversation. Section Two will discuss how the participants drew on shared cultural resources in order to construct the relationship categories of friendship and romantic relationships, and to position themselves as moral beings within the conversation. Section One

In this section, I will discuss how the participants and the interviewer were all involved in the construction of the participants as friends; and how the interview context and myself as an interviewer often facilitated the friendship performance. To do so, I will begin with a discussion of how participants accomplished their friendship in what I call friend moments, drawing on locally shared resources and addressing each other directly, and how as an interviewer I contributed to these moments. Next I will address how the normative subject positions of “researcher” and “participant” were violated during participants’ performances of friendship. I will also discuss how friend moments are facilitated by the safety of an interview context, or alternatively, by moments when this context becomes less safe. Finally, I will discuss some of the resistance that I faced as an interviewer trying to understand the shared inside world of friends. Friend moments accomplished by drawing on local resources not shared by the interviewer, and by using first person addresses. At certain moments in the interview conversation, the participants drew on local resources not shared by the interviewer (i.e., myself), and addressed each other directly. These conversational moves helped participants position each other as friends, in contrast to me as a stranger. This happened in several ways throughout the course of the interviews, depending on the conversational context. When one participant was giving an extended narrative, for instance, there were often moments where he or she briefly interrupted the account by addressing the other participant directly.

29 For example, responding to a question about friends spending less time with friends when they have a romantic partner, Claire gave the name of a particular friend, with whom her co-participant, Betsy, indicated familiarity: 1 C: Cus, cus we’ve had friends, I’m, think about (B: yeah) Kimberly right now 2 (laughing) (B: yeah) Yeah. Who’s like. I I honestly haven’t seen her in weeks, 3 because (I: wow) (B: yeah) When she’s with a boy, it’s like only that exists and, 4 (B: yeah) you know

Claire told someone to “think about Kimberly right now” (L. 1-2), before laughing. She was addressing Betsy directly, which was a shift from the narrative directed at everyone present. As the interviewer, I was familiar neither with Kimberly (who had not been mentioned previously in the interview), nor with her current situation; and there was no indication that I should be. However, Claire addressed someone (presumably Betsy) about Kimberly, suggesting that she should be familiar with her, and indeed Betsy responded accordingly with her agreement (L. 2). As Claire proceeded to explain about “Kimberly right now”, Betsy acknowledged the situation through agreement several times, continuing to position herself as someone who would know this. Taylor made a similar move by giving names of friends (L. 2) not previously mentioned in the interview, although presumably familiar to his co-participant, Andrew: 1 T: But like if, if I s-. Like why I said that. If you just start dating someone, 2 you’ve only known em, like for example, Nate and Stacey? Like. They didn’t 3 even know each other really before they started dating. Which was like a month 4 ago? (A: mhm) I mean.

Providing “Nate and Stacey?” (L. 2) as an example is not helpful as an explanation if the listener is unfamiliar with them or their situation, and so continuing with his account, Taylor proceeded to explain that they “didn’t even know each other really before they started dating” (L. 2-3). Note, however, that Taylor’s intonation rose after listing the names, suggesting a request for some input, although no-one provides any. He continued his explanation providing a time frame (i.e., a month ago, L. 3-4) and raised his intonation again while saying this. Here is where Andrew confirmed the account, and simultaneously accepted the subject position as someone familiar with the situation that Taylor offered in naming Nate and Stacey explicitly.

30 In these situations, the speaking participant referred to common friends by name, despite these people being unknown to the interviewer. Notably, as the interviewer, I never inquired as to the identity of any of the named parties, and more importantly, I did not react to the participants drawing on locally shared resources unfamiliar to me, without explanation or apology. While the two examples discussed above are short, with limited input from the participant not giving the account, in other situations, the two participants engaged in a longer conversational exchange addressing each other directly. For example, after I presented the participants with a gender stereotype (with which Betsy agreed) and both participants laughed, I began to elaborate. Then, Claire jumped in, interrupting, to address Betsy directly, referring to a particular conversation the two of them had with a particular third party at a particular moment (i.e., John in the car, L. 7). 1 I: Stereotypes that men’s friendships are more instrumental and aggressive and 2 women’s friendships are more (C laughs) expressive about (C laughs) talking (B: 3 yeah laughs) and less about doing things 4 B: Yeah, no. So true (laughs) 5 I: And, men tend to 6 [ 7 C: Member we asked John this in the car 8 B: Did we? 9 C: Yeah, I asked him if had sleepovers, when he was younger 10 [ 11 B: OH YEAH. True.

It is clear that Claire was addressing Betsy directly, referring to both of them in the first person plural, and asking if Betsy if she remembered (L. 7). Initially, Betsy responded with a question (“did we?”, L. 8), and Claire switched to “I” (L. 9), allowing for the possibility that although Betsy was present for the conversation, she may not have done the asking. Claire also specified the topic of the conversation (i.e., sleepovers, L. 9). At this point, Betsy indicated that she was aware of the conversation in question (L. 10), and Claire and Betsy proceeded to explain to me what this conversation was about. 13 C: Cus I was. Like I don’t know. I never really thought about guys having 14 sleepovers. (B: yeah) (I: yeah) I never heard of that in middle school. But I always 15 heard about it when girls did it right (B: yeah) And he was like. Yeah, we mostly 16 played Nintendo (laughs) (B: yeah) so (I: umhum) It’s like hmmm 17 [

31 18 B: And then he said, like, 19 it comes to a point where his parents never let him go over for sleepovers cus= 20 C: = Right cus they’re getting older 21 [ 22 B: That might be too= 23 C: = and that’s a little= 24 B: = T- you know 25 [ 26 C: Mmm, yeah= 27 B: = Is there something 28 C: Yeah. Are are John and Joseph more than just friends? (laughs) 29 [ 30 B: Which is just ridiculous (laughing) 31 yeah 32 C: Yeah. (I: okay) So I don’t know. (B: yeah) 33 I: So the parents not letting the kids go over for sleepovers […]

While Claire elaborated on the topic (beginning in L. 12), Betsy was vocal too, acknowledging Claire’s account (L. 13, 14 & 15). I reappeared in the conversation at L. 13, with brief, supporting contributions, e.g., “yeah”. For the remainder of the excerpt (L. 15-31), Claire and Betsy co-constructed their account, talking with much overlap, and taking over for each other mid-sentence. While more happened in this passage, the significant point here is the was a moment of clear insiderness, with the participants addressing each other directly and drawing on locally shared resources, followed by an explanatory period where the participants used their shared resources in order to co- construct an explanatory account in front of me. However, unfamiliar with the local resources, I was still not an active participant in the conversation, and so, I followed up (L. 32) with a comment summarising the parental behaviour described in the account, thereby bringing myself back into the conversation as the interviewer. Sometimes, while the primary speaker was giving an account, the listener interjected, asking for more information. For instance with Alicia and Guenivere: 1 G: Aannnnd, it was that was like my first boyfriend, it was so awkward .h cus 2 we’d been friends and we ended up .h going to the school dance together (I: 3 umhum) And thennn, um, the next day he was just like, so are we dating? And I 4 was like I guess so. .hh So that was like .hh we didn’t really have experience and 5 so that did not end well. But we’re still friends now like, he’s like my bro- James 6 [ 7 A: which one

32 8 A: OH (G: Yeah laughing) 9 (A and G both laugh) 10 G: Um, he’s like my brother now so like, we obvious- we got over it and we’re 11 really really close still (I: yeah)

In the case above, Guenivere was telling the story of how she got together with her first boyfriend, positioning both herself and her boyfriend as lacking experience at the time (L. 4), thereby accounting for that particular romantic relationship ending badly (L. 5) without blame. She followed this up by asserting that they are still friends, and began explaining that he is like a brother (L. 5), a relationship that is very close but which also lends support to their dating incompatibility without blaming either party. At this point, Alicia jumped in while Guenivere was still talking, asking “which one” (L. 7), a question that suggested Alicia knew Guenivere’s friends. Guenivere stopped mid-word to provide a name (L. 5), which could only be meaningful to someone who already knew the person in question. Then, the two participants had a moment where they reacted to each other and laughed (L. 8-9). As the interviewer, I did not react to this, and notably did not inquire further into who James is, or why the participants were laughing. Again, this interlude marked the participants as insiders, as friends, and myself, the interviewer, clearly as an outsider who did not share the local resources (e.g., represented by the name James). When the participants stopped laughing, Guenivere resumed her account where she left off (L. 10), and it was only at this point that I re- entered the conversation, as an interviewer, verbally acknowledging her (“yeah”, L. 11). At times, participants drew on local resources and addressed each other directly beyond a mere acknowledgement of the situation being described. For instance, in the course of her account of an event, Alicia asked her co-participant Guenivere if she had seen specific photographs (L. 6):

1 A: […] My friend brought this rubber chicken (I: umhum) and, so we had, we 2 were like 15 or 16 and so we had this rubber chicken, this BIG thing of CoolAid 3 powder, so we were (I: okay) hopped up on CoolAid so, we were already on this 4 big sugar buzz, and then, we just (1) did like this photo shoot (laughing, continues 5 to laugh) of us with the rubber chicken (still laughing) and like putting the rubber 6 chicken in random places and then. Did you ever see those pictures of Tara? And 7 then, my other friend put a bra on her head (I: umuhum) and we did a photo shoot

33 8 with her and the bra, and then, it just like. We took the window screen out of 9 our hotel, and we were like (laughs) (I: okay)

In asking about the photographs of Tara, named for the first time, Alicia implied that Guenivere was already familiar with the rubber chicken event (and knew that Tara was involved in it). In doing so, she positioned Guenivere as an insider in her life— someone close enough that she may have seen specific photographs of a friend-related event— and therefore constructed the two of them as friends. In naming an individual unknown to me, the participant accomplished the same thing as in previous examples, namely positioning herself and the other participant as insiders (i.e., friends) in the presence of an outsider (i.e., an interviewer or a stranger). Unlike the previous examples, Alicia’s account, with the exception of the question about Tara, was specific enough for anyone (i.e., even a stranger) to follow. Note that as the interviewer, I acknowledged her account in a supportive manner (i.e., “umhum”, L. 1&7; “okay”, L. 3&9). It was only the reference to Tara which marked a departure from what might ordinarily be expected from someone telling a story. Notably, Guenivere did not respond to Alicia’s question, and Alicia did not orient to this lack of response, suggesting that the question served some purpose other than to elicit information (i.e., a response regarding having seen the pictures, such as “yes” or “no”). This also suggests that the question did not serve to convey information to Guenivere, because then one might expect her to have acknowledged the information in some way, or that Alicia might have followed up if she did not. Yet, Alicia simply carried on with her account, and so the question must have been serving some other purpose: positioning the two participants as insiders (i.e. friends) and myself as an outsider. The mention of Tara served a social purpose, to work up the relationship of the participants as friends by excluding me. Moreover, this is a mundane sort of conversational move, which people might engage in regularly, certainly outside of an interview context. It is also very efficient in that it locates the two participants as insiders, and myself as an outsider in a single short sentence. This may be something that friends routinely do in their conversations with strangers.

34 In the friend moments discussed above, the participants drew on local resources and/or addressed each other directly. These friend moments were relatively short, consisting of a sentence or two. There were, however, other occasions where the participants situated themselves as friends over a longer period in the conversation, sometimes branching off into side conversations that were like small and personal stories within the larger context of the interview story, as Emily and Frank did: 1 I: Um. .hh we sort of touched on the lines between friendship and romantic 2 relationship, and you’re kind of talking like there are FRIEND relationships over 3 HERE and then, um, ROMANTIC relationships over there and, is, what about the 4 sort of meshy space in the middle? 5 F: I think it’s a complicated one, like very complicated 6 [ 7 E: with us that doesn’t exist 8 F: yeah, but in like other friendships, it totally does 9 E: oh yeeaah= 10 F: = because there’s people that you’re friends with that, like um, Matthew Lee 11 or whatever (E laughs) totally LOVES you (E laughs) but= 12 E: = you think so? 13 F: yeah 14 E: he has a girlfriend 15 F: yeah but, there’s, cus you guys have grown up together (E: yeah) that there’s 16 been that separate connection that h-he definitely feels for you. Me and Katie 17 were talking about it like, for a while, he definitely feels that but. I don’t think he 18 ever acts on it, but you can, you can see that like 19 E: I’m oblivious to that 20 F: yeah, and you are pretty oblivious to it for the most part (E laughs) you 21 always have been. To like, any time that happens, but um. There is, I I just, I 22 don’t know like I think it’s, it’s not bad to feel something about that, like about a 23 person 24 E: yeah= 25 F: = but it just couldn’t like= 26 E: = it can be really= 27 F: = you have to real you have to think about what you want more= 28 E: =yeah like you you kind of sacrifice the friendship if you’ve got a good 29 friendship going in that meshy area. If you wanna go there, it’s (F: it) it can make 30 or break a relationship I guess

Responding to a question I posed, Frank brought up Emily’s relationship with another friend, Matthew Lee (L. 10-11). This example provided new information for Emily (i.e., that Matthew loves her, L. 10-11), which she initially questioned (L. 12) and disputed (L. 14), and finally led to an account of why she did not know (L. 19). The two

35 participants worked out this disagreement with each other, while I remained silent, before they turned to answer my question more generally. Initially, the participants responded in general terms to my question (L. 5-8). However, mid-sentence, and very much like the friend moments discussed above, Frank addressed Emily directly, in the second person (L. 11), about Matthew being in love with her. However, unlike the previous friend asides, Emily did not accept his claim, initially questioning it (L. 12), then denying it by referring to Matthew having a girlfriend (L. 14). Frank bolstered his claim by establishing rational grounds for Matthew’s love in their having grown up together (L. 15-16) and noting that Katie (presumably a mutual friend) also agreed (L. 17). Emily would have been hard put to disagree in the face of a reason she cannot deny, i.e., having grown up with Matthew, and the evidence of a consensus, meaning that Frank was not simply offering his opinion. In noting that Matthew is unlikely to act on his feelings of love (L. 17-18), Frank took away another possible point that Emily might have raised, i.e., that Matthew does not explicitly express feelings of love toward her. This conversation was clearly between Emily and Frank, as they addressed each other in the second person, and without explanation, referred by name to people not mentioned previously, and unfamiliar to me (i.e., Matthew and Katie). Next, Emily moved to account for why she was unaware of this situation, by claiming that she is generally oblivious (L. 19)— a characterisation that Frank accepted, noting that she always has been oblivious (L. 20-21). Emily’s laughter coincided with an agreed-upon criticism of her (L. 20), and then Frank concluded by offering his opinion that Matthew’s love for Emily is not bad (L. 22). He did so in general terms, however, and Emily and Frank co-constructed a position that it is okay to have feelings for a friend, but that acting on these feelings risks sacrificing the friendship (L. 22-30). In this example, the participants did not explain anything to me about Matthew, Katie or the relationship they discussed with each other. Similarly, I did not interject or ask for any further details or clarification. Instead, the interaction stood apart, unquestioned, despite the seemingly private conversation occurring in an interview context with an interviewer audience. In addition to the interviewer-participant

36 relationship that I and the participants oriented to and worked out through the interview conversation, there was also clearly a friend-friend relationship that the participants worked out in these friend moments interspersed throughout the interviews. I reacted to this talk by avoiding it completely and keeping quiet, thereby orienting to my outsiderness, even though this interaction occurred in the midst my own research interview. The importance of the interview context in friend moments, and the violations of interviewer and participant subject positions. In the friend moments discussed above, even while the participants spoke directly to each other and ignored me the interviewer, they still oriented explicitly to the interview context. However, in some cases, the friend moments seem to mark a larger departure from the conversational behaviour than might be expected by participants in a research conversation. For instance, as Cody and Z were telling the story of how they became friends, they had difficulty recalling the movie they went to see when they were just getting to know each other (L. 3-11). 1 Z: And we were friends ever since then (I: okay) 2 C: Pretty much, yeah. We saw a movie actually too, before that= 3 Z: = I can’t remember what movie though 4 [ 5 C: Yeah we went to see a movie, at Sunridge Mall and= 6 Z: =I still think it’s The Skeleton Key 7 C: No, that was way after. We went to see a movie and. Member? It was at, we 8 went to East Side Mario’s 9 [ 10 Z: Yeah, I just can’t remember what it is. 11 C: I’m not, it think. She doesn’t care what movie we saw. 12 [ 13 Z: Well I care. (C laughs) 14 (laughs) Yeah. 15 C: Kay. So yeah. So that was about the beginning of (I: okay) yeah.(1) 16 I: All right.

After telling an amusing and detailed anecdote of how they met— being the only two people fully clothed at an underwear party at a bar— Cody mentioned that they went to a movie together before the party at the bar (L. 2), thereby potentially contradicting the story they had just told about the origins of their friendship.

37 Cody introduced the clarification of their first encounter (i.e., a movie) by partially agreeing with Z’s conclusion to the bar story (“pretty much, yeah”, L. 2). Z claimed that he could not remember the movie (L. 3), thereby focusing attention on the details of the encounter instead of the chronology of events (i.e., whether the movie or the bar party came first). Cody followed this up by specifying the location of the theatre (L. 5). However, at this point, Z named a movie, referring to an earlier disagreement (“I still think”, L. 7), and the dispute continued. This passage is taken from near the beginning of the interview. Z’s insistence that he “still” thinks The Skeleton Key was the movie they saw on that occasion (L. 7), suggested that the participants have disagreed on this point in the past. Cody offered further details, e.g., the name of the restaurant they went to (L. 9), but Z claimed he still could not remember the movie title (L. 11). Notably, I remained silent as the participants argued about the movie. In fact, while Cody put the argument to rest (temporarily) by claiming that I did not care, he spoke about me in the third person (L. 12): he did not ask me for input, and I did not offer it. Thus, the conversation between Cody and Z was so insular that they talked about me during their interview, and I did not respond. Accordingly, even though Cody had just drawn Z’s attention to the context of the interview conversation, Z responded that he did care about the movie (L. 14) (even if I did not), marking the movie discussion as personally relevant if not relevant to the interview. Both participants then laughed (L. 14-15); Cody re-oriented to the interview context by concluding the story of the origins of their friendship (L. 16), and I re-entered the conversation, acknowledging the end of the story (L. 16&17). In the excerpt discussed above, the participants interacted with each other, and notably without myself as an interviewer. Even when they oriented to the interview context, the participants did so in a way that separated themselves as insiders (i.e., friends) from myself as an outsider (i.e., not a friend). Specifically, Z did not immediately defer to the interview context when Cody pointed this out explicitly, suggesting that the friend moment actually took precedence, marking a clear violation of what might be typically expected in a research interview. On other occasions, participants violated

38 normative expectations of the interview context during their friend moments by themselves taking on the position of the interviewer posing questions. For instance, in response to my question about how having a romantic partner has affected her relationships with her other friends, Jean talked about her friendships with other women, particularly her single female friends (L. 1-3). While she was talking, Ann jumped in and posed a question that I, as interviewer, might have asked (L. 5-6), thereby temporarily taking on the interviewer role. 1 J: […] Um I’m still always therrrre when they need me and vice versa but. You 2 know maybe the single friends would call each other, first to talk about (1) you 3 know, some guy at the bar rather than call me. 4 [ 5 A: Do you feel like you could make a 6 new? guy friend or would that be threatening 7 J: No I feel like I could 8 A: Yeah 9 J: Umhum, I feel like I could .hh umm (1) He yeah cus. Mark makes, he’s like 10 at his roping and stuff like that he makes, new girl friends and .h Like it we’re st- 11 very open like I wouldn’t. It would be weird if I didn’t tell him about it maybe 12 then there was like uh a name on my ph- on my cell phone? Like I would I would 13 mention like, oh yeah I met this guyyy and we’re in the same class together and 14 working on a project together or something like that. I would just like I think 15 we’re the key is just 16 A: to be open 17 J: to be open otherwise it looks like it’s something it’s not and then that would 18 probably cause an issue 19 I: okay 20 A: yeah

Jean responded to this initially as she might respond to an interviewer, answering Ann’s question directly (L. 7). Jean then provided personal examples, mentioning Mark (L. 9) and his roping (L. 10), without explanation, evidently responding to Ann as a friend. While it was clear from earlier in the interview that Mark is Jean’s partner, there had been no mention of roping, and I could not know from the context what this was or the nature of Mark’s involvement in it. However, Jean carried on with her example uninterrupted, and despite having taken up the position of interviewer, Ann did not inquire further, illustrating that friends can take for granted things that other people cannot.

39 After that, however, Jean offered a hypothetical example of her making a new guy friend (L. 12-14), as a direct response to Ann’s question. Notably, there was nothing in this part of Jean’s account that precluded it being directed to everyone in the interview room. In fact, in finishing Jean’s sentence about being open (L. 16), Ann seemed to be acting as Jean’s co-participant, helping Jean along with her account. However, it is also possible that Ann was still acting as an interviewer, albeit a very helpful one interviewing someone she knows well. Jean and Ann agreed on the normative ways to act in order to avoid giving a partner the false impression of any improper behaviour (L. 15-18) — assisted by Ann’s suggestion of openness, Jean positioned herself as someone who would never cheat. After all, the thing that could cause problems is the false impression of unacceptable behaviour (i.e., “it looks like it’s something it’s not”, L. 17) and not any unacceptable behaviour itself: that does not even need to be considered. In helping Jean construct herself as a moral being, Ann clearly took up the subject position of “participant” (once again). Accordingly, it is only after that, and after Jean finished her account, that I came back into the conversation as an interviewer, through verbal acknowledgement (L. 19). While a great deal is happening in this passage, it is important that the participants are interacting as friends, and also conducting the interview for a moment on their own. Furthermore, it is not clear precisely when the conversation shifted from being specifically between the participants to the exclusion of the interviewer (in fact launched by one of the participants’ own questions) and when the conversation was more generally responding to the interviewer. Notably, Ann’s question, (unlike say Alicia asking Guenivere for the name of a friend) was informed by the interview context itself. Specifically, she did not just ask any question the way any interviewer might, she asked a particular question that I, as the interviewer in this specific context, might have asked. In this way, Ann’s question oriented to the interview in progress while simultaneously allowing herself and Jean to step beyond their conventionally assigned participant subject positions. In some cases, the participants were slightly hesitant to assume the interviewer position, but did nevertheless. For instance, when Emily interrupted Frank to ask him a

40 question related to what he was talking about, she immediately apologised for doing so (L. 5). 1 F: Yeah. And it’s just like I think it’s g- li- goes how like deep your connection 2 is and if it’s just like, oh you hang out when other people arrround then there 3 definitely is that thing. But if you’ve shared like .h close personal things and .h 4 nothing’s really come OUT of it I guess= 5 E: = can you be friends with exes? Sorry me question 6 F: mm I don’t think so= 7 [ 8 I: Don’t be afraid to speak

Frank quickly began to answer the question (L. 6), and just as he did, I reassured Emily that it was okay for them to be asking questions themselves (L. 8). The conversation continued with Frank and Emily together addressing Emily’s question. While much is going on in this passage, with Emily and Frank negotiating differing views on the subject, the point is that they actively debated the issue between them. Initially the participants agreed that friendship with former romantic partners is somewhat problematic (L. 9-10), but Emily implied that it works when both former partners move on (L. 13). Frank initially reacted by simply denying this possibility loudly (L. 14), and then following up this contradiction with more tentative “I think” and “in my opinion” statements to explain his view (L. 14). 9 F: = I don’t think s-. Well you could be I’m sure 10 E: yeah. I don’t think it works out not at first 11 [ 12 F: IIIII don’t thinks s- cus= 13 E: = till they both move on 14 F: UMM NO I don’t even think because (coughs) (E: yeah) in MY opinion 15 when youuu (1) don’t wanna be with somebody there’s obviously some 16 characteristic that you, are not happy with. And there’s something that .h you’re 17 not okay with and so .h and. I think you can be definitely acquaintances 18 [ 19 E: that’s true Emily initially accepted Frank’s position regarding acquaintances, agreeing that former partners can definitely be acquaintances (L. 20), but she followed up about a closer relationship (i.e., “hanging out alone”, L. 24): 20 E: yeah= 21 F: = I’m acquaintances with a lot of like people like that but 22 [

41 23 E: right but in terms of 24 hanging out alone 25 [ 26 F: but in terms of hanging out it’s just like (1) cus whenever like if I- 27 like if I’ve, li- the couple times that I’ve done that I’ve been like, ohh. (1) hm. 28 That’s what I dumped you (E laughs) sort of like. I don’t like that, why am I 29 gonna hang out with you? 30 [ 31 E: yeah but what if you got dumped and you were like, I wanna be 32 friends with you so bad still (1) 33 F: oh .hh um 34 E: (laughs) you’ve never been dumped have you? 35 F: welll. No. (E laughs) it’s (almost laughing) it’s um. I just think that like= 36 [ 37 E: I forgot about that (still laughing) 38 F: = you obviously rea- I guess in another standpoint like, there is that wanting 39 to be with somebody, if they, could put it but um (E: yeah). It’s also like well (1) 40 they don’t like me for who I am= 41 E: = yeah yeah exactly 42 [ 43 F: so it’s it definitely goes back to like maybe the insecurity thing

Frank maintained his position, this time offering a hypothetical conversation to illustrate the problem of former partners remaining friends (L. 27-28). Emily responded to this by suggesting the alternative break-up situation (L. 31-32), effectively accusing Frank of lacking compassion. However, when Frank did not respond coherently to this (L. 33), Emily laughed and proposed that he simply has not experienced being dumped (L. 34), which could explain his lack of compassion. Frank began awkwardly to account for never having been dumped (L. 35), but Emily cut him off to account for why she did not know this: she simply forgot (L. 37). The fact that Emily offered an explanation for her not knowing about Frank’s relationship history implies a familiarity between the two of them, and positioned Emily as someone who should know these things about Frank: she is clearly an insider in his life, and nothing more about his relationship history needs explaining. The familiarity between the participants is further evidenced by their quick replies, speaking while the other is still speaking, disregarding more conventional turn-taking behaviour. At this point, Frank offered an account from the perspective of the “dumped” party in support of his initial position (L. 38-39), why friendship between former partners is problematic.

42 Without orienting to my presence as an interviewer, and without interruption from me, the participants returned to their discussion inspired by Emily’s initial question (L. 43). They continued in this way without verbal acknowledgement from me for another page and a half of transcript, conducting the interview themselves, at one point even consulting the conversation guide. While there was a clear interlude when the participants had a friend moment, (i.e., addressing each other directly and drawing resources from their shared history), the conversational space before and after this did not clearly address the interviewer. The participants spoke both in general terms and from personal experience. It was a conversation that could potentially occur between the two of them alone, yet it took place in front of a silent interviewer audience, and with respect to content, fell within the designated subject matter of the interview. While the previous two excerpts illustrate discussions beginning when one participant took up an interviewer-like position, asking a specific question that I might have asked as an interviewer in that context, there are many passages where the participants stumble otherwise into the type of debate seen above. For instance, when faced with the question of how sexual orientation impacts friendship, Jean and Ann addressed men’s friendship across sexual orientation lines and heterosexual male homophobia. Jean began by doubting that gay men would be interested in friendship with straight men because of their closed mindedness (L. 1-3). However, Ann countered that this characteristic does not apply to all of them (L. 5). Jean maintained her position, drawing on the stereotype of the “manly man” (L. 6), to which Ann responded by suggesting that perhaps location and not gender is the relevant homophobia-related factor, proposing San Francisco as an alternative (L. 7-8). 1 J: Yeah. I think (1) mind you I don’t know if a-. I don’t even know if a gay guy 2 would be interested in being friends with a straight guy, maybe they’re too (1) in 3 general (1) I think, still very closed minded in today’s society. Straight guys 4 there’s a .hh prettyy= 5 A: = Not all of them= 6 J: = There’s a pretty narrow idea of what it means to be a manly man 7 A: Well it’s more in thi-. This area is morrrre like that. Like if you go to San 8 Francisco it’s (I: okay) (J: yeeaah) they’re like=

43 9 J: = But they have a big gay community= 10 A: = Yeah but, nobody really cares either way 11 [ 12 J: That’s true, my cousin my cousin’s like 13 a a guy guy in Vancouver but. He goes down to the Vancouver’s gay parade (1) 14 on a Sunday afternoon wh- they hold it, just cus it’s fun. So yeah maybe if you’re 15 around it more you come more comfortable, I’d say in Calgary we’re= 16 [ 17 A: I’d say 18 J: = Pretty hic= 19 A: = If you grow up in a more open society you’re a lot more comfortable 20 [ 21 J: Yeah we’re Calgary’s pretty 22 redneck. I think 23 A: Oh yeah 24 I: And you have the t- textbook gender differences in friendship

Unlike in previous examples, as the interviewer, I acknowledged this remark verbally. However, even though I was not completely silent, the participants carried on with their discussion effectively ignoring me. Jean and Ann continued working out their disagreement (L. 9-10), and Jean ultimately conceded (L. 12), offering her cousin as an example (L. 12-14). Jean’s example of “a guy guy” (L. 13) going to the “gay parade on a Sunday afternoon” (L. 13-14) in Vancouver “just cus it’s fun” (L. 14) fits with her initial statement about straight guys because it was based on Calgary’s society (as opposed to Vancouver’s society where her cousin lives). The Sunday afternoon fun parade illustrated a different societal context which would account for different (heterosexual) men. As the interviewer, I not only refrained from interfering in the debate, but I also did not even acknowledge it when it ended. Instead, I changed the subject entirely, referring to textbook gender difference in friendship— a stock question posed in all interviews, and not a specific follow-up question. It is my response as an interviewer which suggests that the interaction between Jean and Ann was more than an interview response. Instead, it was a disagreement being worked out between two people who have some stake in addressing the subject matter with each other. Namely, it was an interaction between two people willing to disagree with each other rather explicitly, and to continue arguing even after the difference of presented views became clear, suggesting a certain familiarity between the participants. Furthermore, in remaining outside the debate, not

44 even playing mediator, I helped construct this familiarity as something between the participants to the exclusion of myself. There are many other situations like this where the participants took up the conversation themselves, working out some sort of disagreement, in front me while I remained generally silent. The topics of these debates ranged from addressing the definition of marriage (between two gay men), to whether a person’s romantic partner is necessarily the (unique) person with whom some ultimate degree of closeness is possible, as compared to the closeness of a good friendship (between two straight men). As these passages tend to be long, often extending over several pages, and since they follow similar format to the one just discussed, I will not present any more here. The point, however, is that in the course of the interview conversation, certain disagreements arose that the participants addressed as they saw fit while I, as their interviewer, stood quietly aside, uninvolved, waiting for them to finish. In doing so, the participants constructed themselves as insiders, i.e., friends, relative to myself as am outsider. In this way, even though I was generally silent, in the interview context I was involved in the participants’ performance of friendship. Friend moments and safety within the interview context. At times, the interview context actually facilitated more directly the conversational moments in which participants constructed their friendship, by rendering the situation safe. For instance, when Jasmine was talking about seeking friends with qualities she would like to develop in herself (L. 1-4), she turned to Tracy to compliment her on her self-confidence (L. 4-5). While Jasmine addressed Tracy in the second person, it is notable that this display on the subject of self-confidence was introduced as an example of what Jasmine was describing to me as an interview response for choosing friends. Tracy responded accordingly, thanking Jasmine (L. 8), and then confirming that she tries to help Jasmine with her confidence (L. 10). 1 J: And I find too that when I pick friends, like I always. I l- I not only l- I not 2 only look for traits that I know that like, I alw- that I had, that we had in common. 3 But I look for traits that I see in that person that I want to like, that I also want to 4 develop? That I want to like work on. Like, for example, like you have really 5 really good self confidence, like I love how much self confidence you have. And I

45 6 kind of hope that by being like really close friends that that will rub off on me 7 and that I’ll (T: mm) work on that too. 8 T: Thank you (laughs) 9 J: You’re welcome (laughing) 10 T: I try to bring up your self confidence like= 11 J: = I know you do 12 T: Because you don’t have reason to not be confident. (2) 13 I: So would you say that you sort of pick your friends deliberately. This is sort 14 of (T laughs) what I’m hearing, that you’re going out and picking friends and 15 picking people to be friends with.

In offering Tracy as an example, Jasmine expressed that she and Tracy are “really close friends” (L. 6), and verbalized her appreciation for her confidence (L. 5-7); and Tracy thanked her (L. 8). Both Tracy and Jasmine laughed during this exchange (L. 8&9). This type of explicit show of appreciation coupled with Jasmine taking ownership of her own lack of confidence was potentially a very private moment between two people. Yet, the expression happened in front of a third person, who was effectively a stranger, making it a display of friendship performed in front of an interviewer audience. Tracy was doing exactly what Jasmine said she would do when she offered her as a confidence-related example (i.e., helping Jasmine build her confidence, L. 12), which of course is not to say that the friend moment was un-genuine. Moreover, as an interviewer, I again remained quiet. In fact, it was only after a two second pause that I began to speak again, and I did so in a way that avoided addressing the friend moment. Instead, I asked about choosing friends deliberately (L. 13-15), which is a safe topic of conversation, compared for instance, to asking for further details regarding how Tracy helps raise Jasmine’s apparently low confidence. Sometimes my mere presence as an interviewer was enough to support a friend moment, particularly in situations where the participants spoke facetiously about their relationship. For instance, at the end of the interview between Jean and Ann, Jean claimed that she was not actually Ann’s friend and that she in fact did not even like Ann (L. 3-4). Both Ann and I laughed immediately (L. 3), and Jean herself laughed when she finished saying this (L. 4). While I acknowledged this comment (laughing), I did not follow it up (L. 5). Jean then, acknowledged it, also laughing (L. 6); meanwhile Ann

46 herself continued to laugh (L. 6). These were the last words before I turned off the recorder. 1 I: okay (1) all right so, unless you have anything to add I think we (A: I’m 2 okay) can stop there= 3 J: = I’m not really her friend (A laughs) (I laughs) I don’t like her, I talk about 4 her all the time behind her back (laughs) 5 I: okay (laughing) 6 J: yeah (laughing) (A still laughing)

Although Jean was clearly addressing me, talking about Ann in the third person, the statement was obviously made in jest, further constructing the two participants as friends. At the end of several interviews, the participants joked in similar ways made safe by my presence as an interviewer. For instance, after Cody solicited any listeners who are “cute and gay” to call him, and then Z shouted out Cody’s phone number. Both participants then laughed and Cody addressed me directly, clarifying that this comment was just for my amusement. Similarly, at the end of another interview, Hugo claimed that Jack was a bad friend because Jack shares less information with him than he does with Brianna (previously established as Jack’s girlfriend) (L. 1-2). 1 H: I think Jack’s a terrible friend cus he won’t tell me things (J laughs) that 2 he’ll tell Brianna 3 J: No. In fact. Yeah, I would say that we’re very close friends because, Iii tell 4 him, an ungodly amount of things that (2) of just tha- and that’s what defines our 5 friendship is the is the trust, and the comfort. Comfort and trust (2) 6 H: But you don’t love me Jack. 7 J: Unfortunately (H laughs) not. 8 I: okay. So, stop there then.

Though Jack laughed at Hugo’s statement, he responded by defending himself against charges of not being a good friend (L. 3-5). In doing so, both Hugo and Jack spoke about the other in the third person. Throughout the course of the interview, Jack had defined both friendship and love in terms of comfort and trust. Furthermore, Hugo and Jack had had a lengthy debate, with Hugo repeatedly challenging Jack, who claimed that his relationship with his girlfriend Brianna was closer and more profound than a relationship with any friend (including Hugo) could ever be. Jack’s characterisation of his friendship with Hugo here finished with him affirming its comfort and trust, twice in fact (L. 5). After doing this, Hugo addressed Jack directly and accused him of not loving him

47 (L. 6). Jack confirmed this, specifying “unfortunately” while Hugo laughed (L. 7). Again, I did not intervene as an interviewer in what was clearly a moment between friends, albeit a joking one. I did, however, play a role in the moment. Specifically, it was my presence as an interviewer which rendered safe Hugo’s implication that he (a straight man) wants Jack (another man) to love him. Another good example of this safety occurred at the end of the interview between Angela and Mike. For instance, in response to one of my questions, Angela talked about how she does not speak to her best friend everyday, but how this is not a bad thing in the context of their relationship (L. 1-4). After a short pause, Mike then asked if that extended to him, phrasing this “don’t have to talk to you” (L. 5), as though speaking to Angela were an obligation. Angela immediately confirmed (L. 6), and Mike loudly exclaimed, “Sweet!” (L. 7), suggesting this is a good thing. Angela responded by laughing (L. 7). After a pause, she then explained that Mike is “basically” her best friend “on top of whatever romantic relationship” they have (L. 8&10). 1 A: Like right now my best friend, I wouldn’t say that I talk to her every day. 2 You know I don’t have, I don’t feel the need to talk to her everyday. Um but at the 3 same time we know that we’ll still be there for each other. (I: okay) Do you know 4 what I mean? So (I: umhum) (2) 5 M: Does that mean I don’t have to talk to you every day either?= 6 A: = yeah (laughs) 7 M: SWEET. (A laughs) (3) 8 A: But (1) He’s basically my best friend, so (laughs) 9 M: Yeah 10 A: On top of whatever romantic relationship (2) 11 I: Okay (A laughs)

While Mike and Angela participated in the study as friends, they also self- identified as romantic partners, which is clear in this passage. In an everyday conversational context, it would probably not be safe for one partner to suggest that speaking to the other partner is an obligation, nor to express excitement at not being held to fulfill this obligation. One would certainly not expect one partner to articulate this directly to the other partner. However, in the presence of the interviewer, this kind of exchange was a safe joke.

48 There are other examples where friend moments were related to safety in a broad sense within an interview context. For instance, when the idea of friends with benefits came up in the interview with Ben and Seb, the participants described their circle of friends as traditional. Ben then claimed that he and his girlfriend were an exception to this (L. 1-2), and I followed up asking for more clarification (L. 3). Ben provided the example of the imaginary scenarios he and his girlfriend construct, which included kidnapping people (L. 5-7). When I reacted to the kidnapping idea (L. 9), Ben merely confirmed that he had in fact said kidnapping, by repeating it (L. 10). 1 B: […] I think I’m one of the exceptions where. Wwwe where we have a like a 2 more like (1) more interesting lifestyle 3 I: what do you mean by that 4 [ 5 B: Concept like we, we like to joke about like dating other 6 people that we we can try to kidnap an put em together in our weird escapades and 7 stuff, you know that’s not actually true 8 [ 9 I: kidnap (laughing) 10 B: yeah kidnap

My reaction to Ben’s imaginary kidnapping games placed him in a tenuous position within the conversation. Seb immediately reacted to the expression of kidnapping (“oh my godd”, L. 11), but as became clear, he was already familiar with this game. Instead then, he was reacting to my response, beginning to help his co-participant out of conversational trouble: 11 S: oh my gooddd (laughing)(B laughs) 12 S: yeah but you guys both you guys both do it so it’s kind of 13 [ 14 B: yeah yeah it it’s very mutual= 15 S: = if just you did it it would be creepy 16 [ 17 B: yeah it would be creepy but yeah I think that’s 18 wh- I think that’s the reason why uh that’s why we like each other so much the 19 girlfriend and I that (S laughing) I’m with like we both have very we both have 20 very weird= Seb followed his initial exclamation by face-value repair work, normalising Ben’s behaviour— they both do it so it is okay (L. 12)— initially addressing Ben directly; and Ben quickly responded by confirming the mutuality (L. 14-15) even before Seb has

49 finished speaking. Seb in turn affirmed that if Ben did it alone, “it would be creepy” (L. 16), implying that since he is not alone, there is nothing wrong with the kidnapping game. Ben agreed, and pointed to this as a reason “why we [Ben and Ben’s girlfriend] like each other so much” (L. 19). 11 I: = both enjoy kidnapping people (laughing) 12 B: welll (1) yeah (laughs) no 13 S: no they seem to get along pretty well 14 B: yeah have a lot of the same interests and same and same 15 [ 16 I: mutual consensual kidnapping 17 (B: umhum) 18 S: in their own special way 19 B: exactly exactly very very special 20 I: yeah that sounds nice (very quiet) 21 S: yeah there are definitely couples in, my group that just seem to be a little bit 22 (B: two of a kind) more in line with each other

At this point, after Ben and Seb had constructed a version of his kidnapping game as acceptable, Ben oriented back to the interviewer, specifying that the “we” in question was in fact his girlfriend and himself (L. 20). However, I commented yet again about the kidnapping (L. 22), to which Ben made an awkward reply (L. 23). Both Seb and Ben then engaged in more normalising work, about how Ben and his girlfriend get along really well and share interests (L. 24-25). Then I made a further comment about the kidnapping (L. 27-28), followed by Seb labelling Ben and his girlfriend as “special” to account for their behaviour (L. 29), which Ben accepted readily (L. 30). Finally, I backed off, accepting this as an explanation (L. 31), and the conversation continued. While Seb and Ben did have a friend moment (i.e., where they addressed each other directly, and drew on a locally shared familiar context), this interaction served directly to normalize Ben’s comment. Seb was helping his friend out of conversational trouble. Significantly, he was both willing do this (despite any risk to his own face-value presentation) and able to draw on his familiarity with Ben’s relationship with his girlfriend in order to do so. The two participants worked together in order to repair my image (or judgement) of Ben, and in doing so, they constructed themselves as friends, playing out their friendship in that interaction.

50 There are other contexts, where my mere presence as the interviewer made an exchange between the friends less safe. For instance, while illustrating the point that the expression “more than friends” does not necessarily apply to romantic or sexual partners, but can apply equally to other (non-sexual), very close relationships, Cody mentioned a friend who is like a sister to him (L. 1-2). Inexplicably, Z burst out laughing, followed by Cody’s laughter (L. 3). Cody then told Z to shut up (L. 4), even though Z had said nothing beyond his laughter. Cody laughed again, and then explained their seemingly strange behaviour (L. 4-5). 1 C: But I mean, like I d-. I mean, I’m, Stephie’s more than a friend, she’s like a 2 sister to me. 3 (Z laughs) (C laughs) 4 C: Shut up (laughing) There’s an ongoing joke that I’m in love my cousin, 5 which is NOT (I: okay) something that we need to talk about. (Z still laughing). 6 But, do you know what I mean? Like (Z laughs) that’s big. SO yeah, you can be 7 more than friends like (Z still laughing) I say (I: umhum) Zsy’s more than just a 8 friend, for sure, (I: umhu) But I mean, obviously you know when I say that I mean 9 by (I: umhum) you know (2)

Notably, Cody not only informed me of the existence of the incest-related inside- joke, but he also immediately insisted that it is “not something that we need to talk about” (L. 5). In doing so, he preempted any further inquiries on my part, and situated the interaction as a private one between friends, positioning any attempt on my part to learn more as an unwelcome intrusion. Cody then simply carried on with what he was saying about being more than friends while Z continued laughing. Here, Cody used his relationship with Z as another (safer) example of a platonic relationship, close enough to be considered “more than just a friend” (L. 7-8). It is interesting that after discussing the many people who believe them to be romantically involved with each other, Cody drew on his friendship with Z as a safer example of a platonic “more than friends” relationship than a brother-sister relationships between a gay man and a woman. This moment offered a mere glimpse into the esoteric, private world of two friends, and Cody (i.e., the participant whose dignity was at stake) maneuvered conversationally, as much as possibly, to keep me, the interviewer / stranger, out. Resistance facing an interviewer trying to understand the inside world of friends. In some situations, participants resisted my attempts to increase my understanding of

51 them, by taking for granted a shared history that I could not access. For instance, Spongebob described an e-mail she sent to a friend, which ultimately ended that particular friendship. I then asked Spongebob about her intentions in writing this particular e-mail (L. 1-2), and she indicated that she could not really remember (L. 4). Optimus Prime made a quick comment while Spongebob was talking, which explained her difficulty remembering (L. 6). 1 I: Okay. And is that what you were trying to accomplish when you e-mailed her? 2 her? 3 S: No. (I: no) I was just, no. Just tryna tell her I was mad at her, and like how. I 4 don’t even remember. 5 [ 6 O: drunk 7 I: Pardon me? 8 O: Nothing (laughing) I said she was just drunk but I was just kidding. 9 I: At the time of writing the e-mail or 10 (O and S laughs loudly) 11 O: At the time, yes (laughing) (S still laughing) 12 I: Now, what would you say. What role do you think alcohol plays in uh 13 friendships (laughing)

When I attempted to follow up on what Optimus Prime had said (L. 7), he initially backed off, laughing (L. 8). He then repeated what he said— that she was drunk— claiming to have been “just kidding” (L. 8). When I asked for further clarification (L. 9), both Spongebob and Optimus Prime laughed wildly for no apparent reason. Optimus Prime then confirmed what he meant, while he and Spongebob continued to laugh (L. 11). Notably, Spongebob did not comment either way about what Optimus Prime said, not even when I persisted in asking for clarification. The behaviour of the two participants suggested that Optimus Prime was familiar with the situation and e-mail to which Spongebob was alluding. Similarly, whether alcohol-related or not, both Optimus Prime and Spongebob oriented to something funny, although they clearly resisted sharing this with me. Despite several attempts to inquire into the situation, the participants did not provide an explanation. Furthermore, I did not ask directly what the participants were laughing about. Instead, I backed off, and posed a more general interview question, about the role of alcohol in friendship, thereby changing the subject. In doing so, I oriented to

52 my own outsiderness with respect to Spongebob and Optimus Prime’s friend moment. Although the participants never directly refused to explore their apparent “inside joke”, I never put them in the position of having to do so. In this case, since the specifics surrounding Spongebob’s e-mail were not themselves directly relevant to the interview, I dropped my line of questions in response to the participants’ initial resistance. However, in other situations that bore more directly on the interview context, I did persist further in exploring the participants’ shared world. For instance, Angela and Mike described their romantic relationship status as unknown to many people in their social world. After about two pages of transcript and much conversational manoeuvring by both Angela and Mike in order to avoid directly explaining why this is the case, I finally clued in that Angela’s former partner was abusive and remained a threat. After I named the problem (i.e., abuse), the participants were more willing to talk openly. Here, it was only after a great deal of prying that I as an outsider managed to gain some insight into the participants’ shared insider world. While Mike and Angela’s resistance was explicit, there were other situations where the participants resisted my inquiries into their shared world more innocuously, by simply taking for granted things that I, as an outsider, did not know. For example, while discussing the function of dating relationships, I asked Riley and Jacob if they thought it “important to be looking toward marriage” (L. 1). Both participants responded verbally to the question (L. 3-5), but then Riley laughed for a long while (L. 5-7) and Jacob responded with a sound of frustration (L. 6). However, the participants proceeded to answer my initial question without noting or explaining their own or each other’s reactions. 1 I: Do do you think it’s important to be looking toward marriage? 2 [ 3 J: I don’t know 4 J: not always. 5 R: um. (I: no?) I do (laughing) 6 J: ahhrhh (sound of frustration) 7 I: I I I s- I keep (R still laughing) 8 R: I would just

53 Jacob, taking up his position as a gay man, explained how dating can be a learning experience, for instance, having helped him learn that dating girls was not for him (L. 9-11). Accordingly, this dating was not in search of marriage (L. 15) Riley then agreed that dating can help self-discovery (18-20), and she even explained the high number of failed marriages by referring to a lack of self knowledge (L. 21-23). Extolling the virtues of dating as a learning experience, she finished by concluding that the ultimate goal of dating is eventually to find a long-term partner (L. 24). At this point, she laughed again, inexplicably and unexpectedly, which indicated to me that there was some potentially relevant information to which I was not privy. 9 J: I think v- ah when you date somebody, you can also find yourself (I: okay) 10 through that? So like, this can be awkward, but I would dated a couple girls (I: 11 yeah) and through that I was like, I would definitely NO 12 I: okay 13 J: so it’s like that i- h-, it helped me define my identity I guess 14 I: all right 15 J: so I wasn’t searching marriage 16 I: no. 17 J: so for me it wasn’t (I: okay) 18 R: yeah and I think dating would be important because you learn things about 19 yourself? Of how you handle certain situations? (I: umhum) and what you want in 20 other people? And what you don’t want (I: okay?) cus lots of people will like, 21 have lots of failed marriages and s keep saying it’s the other person? But it’s like, 22 you’re still the same, so you have to, I think just dating just shows you what 23 you’re doing? (I: okay) and that can help you? In like future relationships, but I 24 still think the main goal of dating is to, eventually find (laughs) a partner

Combined with Riley’s previous laughter and Jacob’s noise of frustration, I followed up inquiring if Jacob and Riley had a standing disagreement about the purpose of dating and marriage (L. 27-28). However, Jacob’s response was tentative (“I guess so. I’ve never even noticed it was any different”, L. 30-31). Riley explained that she simply really wants to get married, then laughed (L. 32). Although Jacob confirmed Riley’s comment (L. 34), I still probed further, orienting to myself as an outsider still missing something. To this, Jacob responded that Riley has wanted to get married since she was a small child (L. 36), which was the bit of information which contextualised Riley’s laughter and Jacob’s noise of frustration.

54 25 R: […] the main goal of dating is to, eventually find (laughs) a partner 26 [ 27 I: I take it this is a l- little 28 bit of a contentious issue between the two of you (R laughing) 29 [ 30 J: I guess so, I’ve never even noticed that it was any 31 different 32 R: Well, cus I just really want to get married (laughing) 33 I: okay 34 J: this is true (laughing) 35 I: and you’ve noticed this? (R laughing) 36 J: Well, no, like, since like, four years old this girl’s been talking about getting 37 married (R laughing) (I: okay) so

Having been friends since pre-school, Riley and Jacob shared a common, assumed history. Through the course of this conversation, they did not orient to this as something that would need explaining, and instead took it for granted. Because of this, it is only after several direct requests for elaboration that the participants offered an explanation. This does not appear to be a resistance born of some unwillingness to share private information. The participants neither answered questions indirectly, nor engaged in any repair work when Riley’s longstanding desire for marriage was revealed. In fact, when Jacob eventually revealed this information, he did so with familiarity, referring to Riley as “this girl” (L. 36). Similarly, Riley responded to this by laughing (L. 37). The common history was assumed to the point where my attempts to make it explicit failed initially, with the participants providing other equally reasonable responses to my questions. The participants simply took their insider world for granted, and in doing so, performed their friendship in a way that only became clear after significant work from myself as an outsider. Conclusion. Ultimately, participants constructed their friendships and themselves as friends in many ways throughout the interview context. At times, they did this by stepping outside the interview conversation to address each other directly, often referring to locally shared resources without explanation. Sometimes, they did this in the course of a particular account in the interview; while at other times, through more extended direct interaction with each other. Regardless, the participants not only positioned themselves as insiders and therefore friends, but also performed their friendship in the interview

55 context, supported by the interviewer response (or lack of response) as an outsider. For the most part, I responded to the friend moments by silently not interfering with them. However, at other times, it was my prying that opened the private world of the friends to an outsider’s glimpse, thereby making clear that the shared world of the participants was in fact generally private. In short, the participants constructed themselves as friends and performed their friendships in a diversity of ways, depending on context and purpose of the construction. They participated in friend moments scattered throughout the interview conversations, often by drawing on locally shared resources and addressing each other directly, at times explicitly violating the subject positions of participant that they might be normatively expected to take up in a research conversation. This production of friendship was invariably a co-construction generated from the conversational interactions of not only of the participants as insiders and friends, but also of myself, the interviewer, as an outsider, relative to whom the friendship became intelligible. Section Two

In this section, I will examine in detail how participants constructed friendship as distinct from romantic relationships, and versions of friendship as more or less special with respect to normatively privileged romantic relationships. I will then explore how participants managed romantic and sexual attraction in friendship, and themselves as moral beings in the process; followed by a discussion of the moral imperative forbidding ulterior motives in friendship. Finally, I will address the extensive moral positioning in which participants engaged when attending either hypothetically or otherwise to relationships that include sexual behaviour between friends. Ultimately, I argue that participants constructed themselves as moral beings through their constructions of friendship and the distinction between friendship and romantic relationships. Distinguishing between friendship and romantic partnership. Participants in all the interviews constructed friendship and romantic relationships as distinct relationship categories. In order to do so, they frequently drew on a lack of sexual desire and behaviour as a distinctive feature of friendship (contrasted with romantic relationships). They did so particularly to begin constructing this distinction, exploring other differences

56 further later on. For instance, in many interviews I asked explicitly about the difference between friendship and romantic relationships, and the conversation between Jean and Ann provides a good example. Jean’s first response was a one-word, loud declaration of sex (i.e., presumably sexual behaviour) as something neatly separating dating relationships from friendships. Her voice was loud, her intonation interrogative, and her articulation was followed by Ann’s laughter and then her own. “Sex” (L. 2) appeared to be something simultaneously obvious and potentially sensitive to discuss (at least in an interview conversation). 1 I: […] what’s the, you know biggest difference or between friendship and a 2 dating relationship with you then 3 A: hmm 4 J: SEX? (A laughs) (J laughs) 5 A: Yeah that’s a big one. (J laughs) And I fiinnd th- well you usually spend 6 more time with somebody when you’re dating them, so 7 J: umhum 8 A: An uh the boundaries I think are different in what you kind of talk about and 9 I: What do you mean by thaat? 10 A: Well k- just like for instance, guy friends and dating friends like you don’t 11 usually talk about seex and all those things with a guy you’re just friends with. (I: 12 okay) Uussually and then if you do it’s more surfaccee type stuff. And when 13 you’re in a relationship you can talk about anything 14 I: Okay. 15 J: Or should be able tooo, maybe not always the case

Ann followed this up with other (probably more comfortable) comparative differences such as amount of time spent with the other person in the relationship, and relationship- related “boundaries” (L. 8) such as norms for (a woman) discussing sex with a man. In doing so, Ann drew on certain norms of behaviour within interpersonal relationships which differ according to whether the relationship is a friendship or a dating relationship / romantic partnership. Ann articulated part of this norm speaking generally, in the second person: “When you’re in a relationship you can talk about anything” (L. 13-14). Jean’s response recognised this norm, implying it to be prescriptive and not descriptive in nature. As the conversation continued, the participants elaborated certain aspects of these norms together, notably under which situations it is permitted to be upset with a male friend. In doing so, the participants clearly imbued these relationship-related cultural

57 norms with moral status. Together, Jean and Ann asserted the general rule that “you can’t get mad at a guy friend for not calling you” (L. 20-21). However, this did not apply to “your boyfriend” (L. 23). Accordingly, a boyfriend (or presumably any romantic partner) has certain responsibilities with regard to the other romantic partner, and when one romantic partner shirks such responsibilities (i.e., fails to call the other partner), the other is justified in being angry. Romantic partners have an obligation to call each other, despite being busy (L. 36), but notably friends are not bound by this moral imperative. 17 A: I guess. And you can get mad at different things at guys when you’re in a 18 relationship and when you’re dating. 19 I: What do you mean by that? 20 J: Yeah like you can’t get mad at a guy friennnd for= 21 [ 22 A: or them when you’re friends = for not calling you. (J: 23 yeaaah) It’s not the same (J laughs) as if your boyfriend doesn’t call youu. 24 J: Yeah totally 25 [ 26 A: It’s totally different than a guy friend not calling (I: okay) you= 27 J: = a guy friend not calling you, they’d be weirded out if you got upseet= 28 [ 29 A: that doesn’t matter 30 J: = probably they’d be like (A: yeah) Come on I’m not your boyfriend, as m- 31 probably what I think. 32 A: Umhum 33 I: Okay 34 J: And I also wouldn’t, I w-. I don’t think I’d get upset if guy friend didn’t call 35 me. If a GUY FRIEND SAID I’ll call you, and then didn’t I’d be like, Yeah 36 whatever they got buussy. But you expect your boyfriend even if they’re busy to 37 make that time, that’s why they’re your boyfriend.

Jean bolstered their account by proposing a response a guy friend might have when faced with anger or hurt feelings that are unjustified according to the norm they had just constructed (L. 30). Rendering this response more powerful, she gave the words in the form of a direct quotation, albeit clarifying that the words she was attributing to some undefined subject are her opinion (L. 31). Nevertheless, in doing so, Jean positioned guy friends in general (and therefore men, not represented in the interview room) as also being aware of these moral prescriptions. Furthermore, the words Jean cast as the general guy friend response, “I’m not your boyfriend” (L. 30), suggest that according to this norm, a boyfriend is a singular

58 entity: the one person upon whom the relevant obligation falls. Similarly, Jean articulated the same sentiment when she spoke generally about “your boyfriend” in the singular (L. 36, 37). This presumed romantic partnership monogamy, a cultural moral norm. Moreover, the use of the third person plural here for a general singular antecedent granted a superficial appearance of gender neutrality. However, “a guy friend” and “your boyfriend” are clearly gendered terms; and so in an account co-constructed between two participants positioned as women, in the presence of a visibly female interviewer, this general language constructed heterosexuality as part of this normative, cultural moral order. In other situations, participants constructed and debated what distinguishes a friend from a romantic partner more implicitly. For instance, after I asked Z and Cody to respond to the popular notion of lovers as friends, Cody took up the idea enthusiastically, without objection, while Z expressed several reservations. While agreeing that a romantic partner needs also to be a friend, Z and Cody explored the differences they expressed: 1 Z: […] Boyfriends need to have some friend qualities, to them, t- in order to 2 make it work. However, I think, like. In order to be in a really good relationship, 3 in my mind, that um, there needs to be a little something more, kind of beyond a 4 friendship there? 5 C: But that’s what sex is for. (Z: .hh) That’s (Z: Welll) the one time you can be 6 with your boyfriend where 7 [ 8 Z: Then then then what’s what’s the difference of friends with benefits 9 then? You know? 10 C: Because you don’t actually really really like that person. You’re just, you 11 know, hanging around with them and enjoying that too. (1)

Z gave a prescriptive albeit amorphous requirement for “a really good [romantic] relationship” (L. 2), namely that “there needs to be a little something more, kind of beyond a friendship there” (L. 3-4). As a response, Cody proposed “sex” (L. 5) as a fulfillment of Z’s elusive criteria. Furthermore, when he elaborated, he employed the second person for a general account, and in doing so, spoke about “your boyfriend” (L. 6) in the singular. This suggests an implicit construction of monogamy as the presumed norm for romantic relationships, in a way that parallels the presumption of monogamy implicit in the cultural moral norms upon which Jean and Ann drew.

59 However, Z did not accept sex as the feature that distinguishes a romantic relationship from a friendship. Instead, challenging Cody’s definition, he brought up friends with benefits relationships (L. 8-9), naming the very arrangements in which friends have sex despite not being involved with each other romantically. Cody explained that (unlike a romantic partner) one does not “really really like” a friend with benefits (L. 10), but instead friends with benefits relationships are simply a matter of “hanging around with them and enjoying that too” (L. 11). There was a pause at this point, and Z began to change the topic, but instead Cody offered another explanation and they continued their conversation: 12 Z: Anyways. I just= 13 C: =But that’s the aspect of it, for me like (I: umhum) That’s what sets it fr- 14 apart for me. Like, NO, like ALL my friends are equal and my boyfriend is my 15 friend. BUT, I kiss him and that’s the difference (I: umhum). Nothing else really, 16 like I don’t. And then maybe I act a bit different too, like? (Z: umhum) But that’s 17 partly cus I feel like have to behave around him 18 [ 19 Z: Yeah. But as for me (C laughs) like the 20 the differences go like way way beyond that. And as for what those differences 21 are, I’d have to really sit and think about it. (I: umhum) It’s just, it’s hard for me 22 for some reason 23 [ 24 C: Maybe that’s why you can’t be friends with someone after you’ve dated 25 them, cus you have different like 26 [ 27 Z: probably, probably. 28 Z: Maybe I should go see a psychiatrist= 29 C: NO, there’s nothing (Z laughs) wrong with that (Z laughs)

As the conversation unfolded, Cody maintained his position that his boyfriend differs from his other friends because that is the person he kisses (L. 14-15). Furthermore, with his emphasis on the singular pronoun “him” and his insistence, “I kiss him and that’s the difference,” (L. 15), Cody constructed his relationship with his boyfriend as monogamous, and shifted from a general account to one of personal experience. On the other hand, Z responded equally personally, that for him, “the differences go like way way beyond that,” (L. 20). The conversation had at this point shifted from a general discussion about the nature of romantic relationships relative to friendship, to the level of personal experience.

60 Interestingly, while the conversation started on the general level, where it could be informed or resolved by citing abstract category definitions, neither participant attempted to produce such definitions, nor did they attempt to explain the different relationship categories that seemed to be central to their apparent disagreement. Instead, they shifted to speaking from their own experience, thereby abandoning attempts to resolve the discussion on a general, abstract and generalisable level. Significantly, as Z began speaking of his own relationships, he noted his inability to name the differences between friendship and romantic relationships without further reflection (L. 21). In doing so, he excused himself from having to produce an account of what, beyond the act of sex, distinguishes romantic relationships from friendships, still permitting him to maintain that such features exist. Ultimately, the participants interpreted this disagreement as the reason for which Cody remained friends with his former partners while Z did not— a difference the participants explored earlier in the interview conversation, but did not explain at that point. Here, the participants drew on their apparently differing constructions of romantic relationships to provide a simple explanation. Similarly, the participants wrapped up their discussion by acknowledging this difference. Having finished with the topic and put it to good use within the conversation, Z and Cody changed the subject and began joking with each other about Z’s mental health. If nothing else, it is clear from this excerpt that the local conversational context is crucial in how participants distinguished between friendships and romantic relationships. When faced with a direct question, Jean provided “sex” as a simple, explicit and potentially obvious answer, clearly explaining the distinction presumed in my inquiry. However, talking about different boundaries in friendships than in romantic relationships, Ann worked up a version of the distinction (with which Jean agreed) that is more complex than the presence or absence of a particular behaviour. Moreover, neither Jean nor Ann denied that such a difference existed. Instead, they then explored prescriptive norms governing friendship, as distinct from romantic partnerships (having nothing to do with sex). Alternatively, when I asked Z and Cody about lovers as friends, potentially implicitly minimising the difference between friendship and romantic partnerships, the

61 participants discussed the distinction at length, even in the absence of a simple articulation of its precise nature (which was explicitly not related to sexual behaviour). Clearly then, it seems that whether or not I presented participants with a friendship as very different from romantic relationships, participants constructed a distinction that was not about sex after all. Friendship as lacking something special, and the privileging of romantic partnerships. There are certain inherent limitations to friendship, implied in the example discussed above by Z’s assertion about a romantic relationship needing something beyond friendship (L. 3-4). His statement regarding a distinct feature present in romantic relationships, but absent from friendships, has analogues in other research conversations. For example, Claire identified an “X factor” and Betsy referred to “that WOW”, suggesting some ineffable effect or attraction. Similarly, Jack cited a lack in “the attraction factor” as the reason he could never love his co-participant and friend, Hugo, beyond a non-romantic friendship. Participants also constructed this undefined attraction as a prescriptive requirement for a “good” romantic relationship. Claire discussed the necessity of attraction in marriage, while Emily and Frank recounted their experiences of dating relationships ending due to lack of attraction, noting “you shouldn’t have to try so hard [to find attractive elements of a romantic partner].” Participants described attraction as an important aspect of romantic relationships, at times, using the presence of attraction to define an interpersonal situation as a romantic relationship, and thereby to differentiate it from a friendship. At other times, the absence of attraction served as an explanation for the end of a relationship. Throughout, however, this attraction implicitly provided an example of something missing from friendship. As participants described this in positive terms (e.g., “that WOW”), this absence then became something special and desirable about romantic relationships that is lacking in friendships. Moreover, several participants talked of altering their approach to cross-gender friendship when they are already involved in a romantic partnerships. For instance, Jack and Hugo discussed limiting interactions with female friends out of respect for their girlfriends (present and past), while Andrew and Taylor described doing this in order to

62 avoid the jealousy of their girlfriends also both present and past. (Previously, Andrew and Taylor had constructed an account of girls as generally inclined toward jealousy.) Neither Jack and Hugo nor Andrew and Taylor mentioned anything about changing the way they interact with other men when they are romantically involved, either out of respect for their partners or in order to avoid jealousy. Similarly, recall from Section One how Jean and Ann discussed the importance of communicating openly with romantic partners about new male friends so as to avoid giving false impressions of unfaithful behaviour (although they did not address needing to be open about new female friends): 1 J: […] the key is just 2 A: to be open 3 J: to be open otherwise it looks like it’s something it’s not and then that would 4 probably cause an issue 5 I: okay 6 A: yeah

As discussed in the previous section, Jean and Ann both focused on the importance of openness, drawing on normative ways to act in order to avoid erroneous impressions of improper behaviour. Note Jean’s emphasis on what might (if she were not open) “look[] like it’s something it’s not” (L. 3), i.e., unfaithfulness. Since problems, in her account, would arise only from false impressions— she did not mention any actual improper behaviour that would not be concealed through openness — Jean positioned herself as someone who would never cheat, and thereby constructed herself as a moral person. Notably, in providing accounts of dealing differently with cross-gender but not same-gender interactions when involved with a romantic partner, these participants constructed themselves as heterosexual, drawing on implicit presumptions of heterosexuality, while simultaneously positioning themselves as moral persons for fulfilling their obligation to protect their (monogamous) romantic partnerships from any friendship-related threats. In some sense then, participants constructed a version of friendship and intimacy in friendship that is potentially threatening to romantic partnerships. Furthermore, when there was a possible conflict between friendship and romantic partnership, in these accounts the participants privileged the (monogamous) romantic partnership.

63 The morally sanctioned privileging of (monogamous) romantic partnership over friendship clearly constructed friendship and romantic relationships as different. In doing so by focusing on something special about romantic relationships (i.e., monogamy, which was worked up as something worth protecting), the participants also worked up a version of what friendship is lacking. Accordingly, participants talked about romantic relationships as being “one step further” than a friendship (i.e. Guenivere), or “higher on that friendship level” (i.e. Hugo). Similarly, Angela described her co-participant, Mike, as being her boyfriend and also (i.e., “on top of”) her best friend. Likewise, Jean described this ideal romantic partner as “a partner in everything you do”, complete with having children. Participants positioned themselves with respect to this normative prioritisation of romantic partnership above friendship in their accounts of their current relationships, or drew on it as an ideal for future life-partnerships. For instance, in a continuation of an excerpt discussed in the previous subsection, Jean and Ann agreed that their romantic partners have an obligation of sorts to make time for them, because they are “special” (L. 38): 36 J: […] but you expect your boyfriend even if they’re busy to make that time, 37 that’s why they’re your boyfriend 38 A: yeah (I: okay) you’re supposed to be special and (J: YEAH) kind of set 39 above everything else, not aboove EVERYTHING but e-= 40 J: = higher on the totem pole (A: yeah) than if you were just a friend

Similarly, the totem pole metaphor clearly prioritised a romantic partner above friend. Furthermore, this totem pole top priority was deployed as the defining feature of a romantic partner relationship (i.e. L. 37), compared to someone who is “just a friend” (L. 40). Accordingly, unlike romantic relationships, friendships then are not special. Friendship lacks the moral imperative that one must make time for a friend, and conversely, people cannot expect their friends to make time for them in the same way that they might expect a romantic partner to do so. At times, however, several participants argued the opposite order of priorities, reaffirming the importance of friendship. In these situations, the participants positioned themselves differently with respect to the same prescriptively normative prioritisation of

64 romantic partnership over friendship: they are simply not ready for a life-partnership yet. For instance, Andrew proposed a balance between friendships and dating relationships (which do not quite seem to be romantic partnerships), cautioning against ignoring the friendships. He referred to his age (early twenties), noting “a girl’s not gonna be there for ever most likely” (L. 3), and referred to his not being ready for marriage in the near future: 1 A: There’s got to be balance, like you need to balance (T: yeah) having your 2 girlfriend and your friends (I: umhum). I think cus. Especially at our age like, a 3 girl’s not gonna be there forever most likely like. Well I don’t see myself getting 4 married, anytime soon so. I feel that, like, if I. Like I wouldn’t wanna lose my 5 friends (I: umhum) by not calling them, or making an effort to hang out with them. 6 (2) (coughs) Cus I do have f-, like I have fun with them and then. And if I, things 7 don’t work out with this girl like. I’m not gonna put all my eggs in one basket. (I: 8 Umhum) I’m gonna diversify my bonds. (1.5)

Andrew supported his argument in favour of maintaining friendships citing a proverb on L. 7 (i.e., “I’m not gonna put all my eggs in one basket”) followed by a cliché on L. 8 (i.e., “I’m gonna diversify my bonds”). Moreover, these metaphors warned against relying too much on one particular thing, in this case a dating partner, but notably, this caveat applied to a girl but not a spouse (e.g. a wife). It is therefore precisely because his current dating relationships lack the special quality that participants constructed as part of the (idealised) romantic partnership that there is no reason to privilege them over his friendships: his friendships are not special, but neither are his dating relationships. Notably, Andrew called for balance among his relationships (L. 1), and constructed his friendships as worthwhile (i.e., something he would not want to lose, L. 4), thereby highlighting the construction of friendship as special in some way (presumably less special than long-term romantic partnerships, but special nevertheless). This valuing of friendship can be seen in the tension constructed pertaining to the possibility of moving from a friendship into a romantic partnership. The participants weighed the value of a friendship against the (potentially short-term) fulfillment from a romantic relationship, approaching the issue with very strong language. Emily and Tracy both spoke of “sacrificing” a friendship and Jacob talked about having friendships “kyboshed”. As Betsy described, in the event that someone risks losing a friendship, and

65 “cancel[s] one thing out for another”, if the partnership should dissolve, then one has not only “lost your partner” but also “someone that you really care about”. In discussing a cost associated with transforming a friendship into a romantic partnership, the participants constructed a version of friendship that entails something special that does not carry over into romantic relationships. Accordingly, many participants discussed what to consider before cautiously “venturing into the blurry zone”, as Emily expressed it. Notably, in focusing on the potential loss of a friendship if/when a romantic relationship ends, the participants constructed a version of friendship that is more valuable than a short-term, romantic relationships, but less valuable than a long-term, romantic partnership. Managing attraction in friendship. Given the careful consideration the participants encouraged when deciding whether to act on attraction in friendship by transforming a friendship into a romantic relationship, it is not surprising that sometimes participants spoke about attraction within the context of friendship. Doing so, however, implicitly denied attraction as a definitive characteristic of a romantic relationship. For instance, Taylor and Andrew brought up the idea of flirting among friends, and responded to my follow-up question about the role of flirting in friendship: 1 T: I think it’s more just like, like temporary sexual arousal, or like gratification 2 (A: yeah) Just like. You just do it because it’s fun right? (A: umhum) (1) But you, 3 I don’t know. They’re still your friend so you wouldn’t pursue it I guess? 4 I: How bout when you throw alcohol into the mix there? (1) You talk about the 5 bar scene, you talked about being drunk before. How bout when you throw 6 alcohol into this whole, mix. What happens there? (2) 7 A: It can be bad.

Taylor spoke generally, in the second person. He normalized the situation by using minimising language, repeating the adverb “just” several times throughout the sentence in various places. He continued that people “just do it [flirt] because it’s fun” (L. 2), providing a harmless and blameless explanation of flirting behaviour between friends, constructing this as something normal. However, he then identified some limitations on the behaviour of friends in such situations. Specifically, while flirting with each other potentially suggests further (sexual) behaviour or the initiation of changes in the nature of the relationship, friends should not take these actions. Taylor continued to speak in the

66 general second person, using the conditional “you wouldn’t pursue it” (L. 3), suggesting that this was not a description of a particular person’s most likely actions, but instead a general prescription for acting. During this time, Taylor was addressing me as the interviewer in a research conversation, and his co-participant verbally acknowledged what he said several times; yet neither participant offered any additional explanation for this, nor did I not ask for any. Accordingly, this prescription appears to be drawn from cultural resources presumably shared by everyone in the interview room. After this, I inquired about situations when participants consume alcohol (L. 5-7), to which Andrew succinctly replied “it can be bad” (L. 8). Providing a value judgement, and using the morally-charged word “bad”, Andrew underscored the moral character of the prescription that Taylor had begun constructing. As the interview conversation unfolded, this moral prescription became more apparent, with the participants discussing alcohol as an excuse for violations of this norm by acting on attraction beyond flirtation: 9 I: It can be (laughing) what do you mean? 10 [ 11 A: Well like, cus you will. Cus there’s people that 12 you wanna just keep as friends (I: umhum) even if there is some kind of sexual 13 tension or something. If you were sober you probably wouldn’t even like. It 14 wouldn’t even be p- possible? (1) But then like, once you’ve been drinking 15 something like that like. (1) It kind of is blurred and you just 16 T: It’s blurred, but at the same time. People exaggerate like= 17 A: = You didn’t, you still know 18 [ 19 T: what alcohol does to you, yeah. You still know right from 20 wrong when you’re drunk (A: yeah) No matter what. (A: yeah) (1) People like s- 21 say. They’ll wake up in the morning and say well Oh I can’t be believe I did that 22 last night I was so drunk I would never do that. (A: yeah) Like well. (1) You still 23 know right from wrong so don’t s- don’t g-, like don’t give me an excuse that you 24 were drunk (I: umhum) that you were doing that. 25 A: Yeah.

When I called on Andrew to explain his assertion that alcohol potentially leads to something bad, he referred immediately to wanting to keep certain relationships as friendships, implying that friendships are valuable. Despite “sexual tension or something” (L. 13) the general “you” was constructed as intentionally involved in keeping certain people “as friends” (L. 12). This appears to be a social norm powerful enough that when

67 people are sober, defying it “wouldn’t even be possible” (L. 14). Alcohol was ascribed the role of permitting people to relinquish their adherence to the norm of not acting on attraction within friendship, thereby rendering such behavioural violations (e.g., engaging in sexual behaviour with a friend) possible. Shortly after this point in the conversation, Andrew talked about an experience where he got drunk and engaged in some form of sexual behaviour with a female friend, who he knew was attracted to him but he wanted to keep as a friend. The passage above set up an explanation for his conduct, using alcohol as an excuse that allowed him to construct himself as a moral person within the conversation, despite the norm violation (i.e., engaging in sexual behaviour with a friend) he was about to disclose. Taylor, on the other hand, rejected alcohol as a legitimate excuse for violating this norm, reaffirming the moral nature of the social norm by affirming with very clear and strong language that even while drunk “you still know right from wrong” (L. 23). Emphasising that the behaviour being excused by alcohol (i.e., an unspecified sexual act between friends) was in fact a matter of right and wrong constructed reacting to attraction in friendship as an inherently (im)moral act. Engaging in some form of sexual practice was then constructed as morally wrong, while refraining from such actions with a friend was constructed as morally right. In other words, friendship was constructed as a relationship where people are not supposed to act on any attraction that might be present. Andrew and Taylor never accounted for the attraction itself, and therefore they constructed a version of friendship as one in which attraction is potentially normal and natural, requiring neither explanation nor excuse. Here, where the speakers talked about experiencing attraction in friendship, attraction was not constructed as problematic, but instead, the participants offered sexual behaviour (following from attraction) in friendship as the moral violation. However, in other situations, participants constructed different versions of what is acceptable in terms of attraction in friendship. For instance, responding to a point on the conversation guide, Ann described the situation of a guy friend expressing sexual desire or attraction as a betrayal. There is a lot happening in the passage on the next page, and I will return to some of it shortly. Jean’s first response to “romance in friendship and blurred boundaries” from

68 the conversation guide was to refer to the fact that she has always had a boyfriend. She followed this up by asserting that “it’s always been quite clear” (L. 3), suggesting a lack of experience with the situations referred to on the guide. Significantly, having a romantic partner was deployed and treated as a self-explanatory reason why a person would not have experience with romance in friendship, or with ill-defined relationships: 1 J: […] uuummmm romance in friendship blurred boundaries? (2) (breathes in 2 and out audibly) I always have had a boyfriend. (1) 3 A: I’ve had that with guy friends 4 [ 5 J: and it’s always been quite clear 6 A: I dunno I’ve found cus I’ve always had guy friends an usually eventually 7 J: Have you ever hooked up with one of them? (laughs) 8 A: Uumm, probably (J laughs) but it. Usually eventually it comes out that they 9 like you. And then you’re you kinda feel a little betrayed cus (J: yeah) they’re 10 supposed (J: ah yeah) to be just your friennd and then it’s like= 11 J: =all this time it was just they were working to get (A: yeah) to you 12 [ 13 A: something else

Jean’s explanation, however, is predicated on the presumption of monogamy as a social norm— it is only because people normatively have a single partner that having a partner should account for a lack of friendship experiences that could involve sexual behaviour (with someone other than that partner) or ultimately the development of new partner relationships. Similarly, it is only because monogamy is a recognised social norm that Jean’s statement met the basic criterion for relevance. Furthermore, she did not explain her response further and neither her co-participant nor I asked for clarification. In drawing on this presumption of monogamy by offering her partner as an explanation, Jean positioned herself morally as someone who (obviously) acts within the prescribed limits of her (monogamous) romantic partnership. Conversely, she positioned romance in friendship and relationships with blurred boundaries as situations that could threaten a monogamous relationship, and therefore also as conducive to the development of romantic or sexual relationships and behaviour. Returning to the beginning of the excerpt, Ann positioned herself as someone who has always had guy friends. In the context, then, of what Jean read from the conversation guide about romance in friendship and Jean’s declaration that she has always had a

69 boyfriend, Ann thereby positioned herself as someone who might have something to say about the topic from personal experience. Accordingly, Jean asked Ann if she had ever “hooked up” (L. 7) with one of her guy friends, to which Ann responded tentatively before shifting the topic of conversation. Jean laughed when approaching this topic, and accepted Ann’s non-specific answer with laughter but without further inquiries. They oriented to Ann being in a sensitive position conversationally, in terms of maintaining her status as a moral person: engaging in sexual behaviour of some kind with a friend is something for which speakers must account. Instead of accounting for her actions, however, Ann changed the subject away from any morally questionable actions in which she might have engaged (once or rarely), to a chronic problem she faced with guy friends, where she positioned herself as an innocent, wronged party. Ann talked about feeling “a little betrayed” when “eventually it comes out that they like you because they’re supposed to just be your friend” (L. 8-10). From the conversational context, it appears that the liking involved in Ann’s statement pertains to some form of sexual or romantic attraction or desire. Jean helped Ann construct the reason for feeling betrayed, notably that the friend in question had ulterior motives or an agenda for the friendship. It was a betrayal to express these feelings after a long period of time, as Jean articulated: “all this time they were just working to get to you” (L. 11), or in Ann’s words to get “something else” (L. 13). This could be interpreted as the friend in question using the friendship in order to get sex, or in order to ease into a romantic relationship. Furthermore, the revelation happened after a prolonged period of friendship where one friend trusted the other not to use their relationship secretly to their own advantage. In describing this situation as a betrayal, the participants thereby constructed moral norms for friendship, and the behaviour of friends. Moral proscription against ulterior motives underlying friendship. In the previous example, the participants worked up a version of friendship in which friends were held to a moral standard of having no ulterior motives for the friendship. Morally upstanding friendship behaviour involves being honest about desires and intentions for the relationship, and more generally, not using the trust of a friend in order to manipulate

70 them for personal gain, particularly where this involves sexuality. In particular, good friends are not supposed to use their friendships in order to gain personal sexual gratification. Andrew and Taylor worked up a similar version of friendship in a discussion of what it means to be “just friends”: 1 I: What d- what you do mean by just friends, like what does that mean to you? 2 A: Um. Someone that you’ll talk to and, you hang out with, but you’d never 3 even like. .h If you’re sitting beside them or something like that or like, walking 4 with them, you never even think about like (1) really like getting like physical at 5 all with them like. Wanting like, hold their hand or like, put your arm around them 6 or anything like. You can do that as friends as well but like, you don’t really think 7 about it? I- I don’t really think about it? When I’m with them (I: okay) Just. 8 [ 9 T: It 10 almost be one of your like, one of your guy friends right? 11 A: Yeah, like you don’t think about holding th- uh their hand while your 12 walking with them or something 13 T: Yeah. 14 A: Yeah. (2) 15 I: So just friends is all about not hand holding? 16 T: Well no. 17 A: Just, you don’t really think about the sexual, physical .h Like cus you can. I 18 still like .hh (1) If m- if one of my f- like friends that’s a girl’s like going through 19 a hard time or something like that (I: mm) I’ll like put my arm around her but like 20 it’s just to be there for her. Like it’s not. It has nothing like sexually or like. It has 21 nothing that I’m tryna get out of it? (I: okay) Sexually, or like, on a more 22 emotional level, I guess. (1) If I’m just friends with her.

Andrew constructed a version of “just friends” in opposition to a romantic or sexual relationship, drawing on the absence of physical signs of affection to be characteristic. Notably, however, he focused on the intentions of the actions, clarifying that the actions themselves (i.e., “putting your arm around them) might be taken in friendship, but “you don’t really think about it” (L. 7-8). In doing so, he positioned this type of friends’ actions of affection towards each other as spontaneous, and not explicitly intentional. Specifically, these actions are without ulterior motives, without underlying deception aimed at gaining personal sexual gratification from a friend. Later, Andrew used the example of not thinking about holding hands with a friend when walking (L. 12- 13), implicitly contrasting friendship with relationships that are not “just friends”, presumably romantic or sexual relationships.

71 When I followed up about the act of hand-holding, or lack thereof in friendship (L. 16), Andrew focused further on the intent of the action. He gave the example of putting his arm around a female friend who was “going though a hard time” (L. 19-20) in order “to be there for her” (L. 21). He clarified further that the act itself was entirely non- sexual and also that “it has nothing that [he’s] trying to get out of it” (L. 22), either sexually or on an emotional level. In doing so, he drew on the version of a good friend acting for the exclusive benefit of the other friend, without ulterior or selfish motivations. In making it clear that he is not attempting to gain anything in the process, he took up the subject position of a good friend with moral integrity. Similarly, in discounting these things, he worked up his hypothetical actions as supportive and clearly not as taking advantage of a vulnerable friend, furthering his construction of himself as a moral person. Andrew began responding to my question by speaking generally in the second person, using gender-neutral terms. Taylor’s response, comparing a person with whom one would be “just friends” to a “guy friend”, thereby clarified that Andrew was talking about female friends all along. Similarly, in using gender neutral terms to refer to people who are in fact of a particular gender, Andrew relied on a presumption of heterosexuality. Furthermore, in doing so, speaking generally and positioning this general “you” as the potential active agent, being the one to “put [their] arm around them” (L. 6-7), i.e., responding to a female friend with an action that could be sexually motivated in a different context, he spoke as a (heterosexual) man and implicitly presumed the general “you” to be similarly gendered. Among other things, here Andrew constructed a version of friendship partially defined in terms of absence of sexual desires and attraction, implicitly contrasted with romantic relationships. There is significant moral positioning in this excerpt, particularly drawing on the prescription for friends to act without ulterior motives, particularly such motives that concern sexual gratification. In light of this moral imperative, it is not surprising that Matt and Angela, for instance, engaged in a great deal of conversational work in order to position themselves morally when discussing how their friendship turned into a romantic relationship. Angela began by affirming that her relationship with Matt

72 began as “just friends”, and then proceeded to describe what she constructed as a natural progression, beginning with increased communication, and then becoming best friends: 1 M: […] did you have any other feelings besides friendship for me? Or did it 2 escalate from just knowing each other, or how did you feel about it (2) 3 A: Well I felt like (1) we were friends just friends to begin with. .hh And we 4 started talking (coughs) got closer, eventually you became my best friend. And 5 having a best friend of the opposite sex sometimes leads to different (laughs) umm 6 I: Sorry, sometimes leads to what? 7 A: Well just leads to different um, I guess friendship dynamics? Sometimes it’s 8 i- it’s more right? 9 M: But at that time you were still dating your boyfriend, right? 10 A: I know. And I think you played a role in why I broke up with him, too= 11 [ 12 M: And I was also 13 (M coughs) 14 A: = Right? 15 M: Nno. I was there to help make your relationship with (A laughs) him better. 16 A: Yeah but then, I had to look at our relationship too at that time. 17 M: But you had no feelings for me back then 18 A: How do you know? I never said that. 19 M: Well I’m here to find out now

Angela gave her account placing her co-participant Matt in the second person. She then broadened the scope of her account by making a general comment, proclaiming that “having a best friend of opposite sex sometimes leads to different…” (L. 5). She did not finish her sentence but instead laughed, potentially signalling a sensitive topic. As an interviewer, I asked for clarification, and she responded by describing first “different friendship dynamics” (L. 8), and following up specifying that “it’s more” (L. 9). This served to clarify that she was talking about a romantic or sexual relationship, which followed naturally from a friendship. Similarly, she relied on the presumption of heterosexuality to make this point (for why else would friendship specifically with the opposite sex lead to a romantic or sexual relationship?). Moreover, Angela drew on a version of friendship that is less than a romantic relationship. Furthermore, in speaking generally as a way of constructing the move toward romantic partnership as a natural progression from friendship, she positioned herself as simply doing what is natural (and therefore not morally reproachable). However, in

73 making this move to account for becoming romantically involved with a friend, Angela was orienting to this change in relationship as something that needed to be accounted for, and therefore also oriented implicitly to a version of friendship governed by a moral proscription against ulterior motives in friendship (i.e., a version where friends should not use their relationship to gain personal gratification through romance or sexual behaviour). At this point, Matt challenged Angela’s explanation, referring to how, at that time, she had a boyfriend, and so (unless she positioned herself as being unfaithful to her partner) her account became problematic. Matt addressed Angela directly, and (in a friend moment of the kind discussed in Section One), drew on a local context not shared by myself as the interviewer. It was Angela’s accountability to her co-participant which was at stake. In challenging her, Matt charitably positioned her (i.e., as monogamous) with respect to an implied moral prescription of monogamy in romantic relationships. Angela agreed, commenting that Matt played a role in her ending her relationship with her then boyfriend. Matt directly and explicitly denied this, interpreting Angela as implying that he (selfishly) broke up her relationship with her then partner, which would have positioned him as a bad friend. He then took up the position of a good friend, as someone who attempted to help her relationship with her boyfriend work out (despite having a crush on her, as he had noted earlier in the conversation). In doing so, Matt aligned his behaviour with the version of friendship without ulterior motives, constructing himself as a moral person. Then, Angela offered an alternate account of what she had said, which did not call into question Matt’s moral status as a friend, instead claiming ownership over her decision to break up with her then partner. She did this by constructing her situation as involving a rational choice between her relationship with her then boyfriend and the potential romantic relationship she could develop with her then friend. Specifically, she claimed that she “had to” (L. 18) consider the relationships, and as such, was beyond reproach for doing so. She implied that during that time period she already “had feelings” for Matt, which Matt attempted to deny when Angela positioned him as not having the ability to make that claim (L. 20). In doing so, she implied that she might have had (and probably did in fact have) such feelings; and Matt responded accordingly, about learning

74 new information in the interview (L. 21). In keeping the declaration of her then feelings implicit, Angela avoided having to account for her feelings, and more specifically for not warding off the threat a new friendship posed to her (monogamous) romantic relationship. This moment in the interview between Angela and Mike is rich, illustrating not only a clear differentiation between friend and romantic partner, but also the normative prioritisation of romantic partnership above friendship. In this context, the participants simultaneously managed the shift of a particularly special friendship into a romantic partnership, while constructing themselves as moral persons despite making this move (which superficially appears at odds not only with the moral proscription against ulterior motives in friendship, but also with the normative moral prescription to protect monogamous romantic partnerships from the potential threat of friendship). In the course of positioning themselves morally, the participants drew additionally on culturally prescribed norms of monogamy and presumed heterosexuality— resources that other participants drew on while positioning themselves morally in a variety of conversational contexts. Moral positioning around friendships that include sexual behaviour between friends. Much like in the previous excerpt, there was a great deal of moral negotiating on the subject of friends-with-benefits relationships, which incorporate sexual behaviour into a friendship. Most participants addressed friends with benefits relationships directly, as this was a topic on the conversation guide. Overwhelmingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, all participants who spoke about friends-with-benefits relationships depicted them as less than ideal. Additionally, participants giving accounts of having partaken in sexual behaviour with friends on a particular occasion (i.e., “hooking up”) or on an ongoing basis (i.e., friends-with-benefits) accounted for their behaviour either by referring to their youth (e.g., Cody), their drunkenness (e.g., Taylor) or both (e.g., Ann and Alicia), frequently expressing regrets. They offered explanations, specifically excuses, for their behaviour, highlighting that engaging in sexual behaviour with a friend is, in fact, a moral violation, and something that needs to be accounted for. Cody does this very accounting,

75 for example, in his conversation with Z. Specifically, after Z read the topic of friends with benefits from the conversation guide, he and Cody discussed them: 1 C: Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve I’ve had some experience with th- with that and it’s 2 (I: umhum) It works. I mean, it never really. .hh It’s not always ideal, like it it 3 definitely does obstruct things. It causes problems eventually (I: umhum) And 4 even if it’s good for a while, it does eventually cause problems. 5 Z: Cus like my my view on it is. Like you’re you’re melding these 2 things 6 together. You’re melding a friendship and a romance in it but. I don’t think, like 7 with anybody, you’re putting your your full heart into any of it. Like it’s (C: 8 umhum) It’s a half-assed romance and it’s a half-assed friendship. (I: umhum) SO 9 [ 10 C: It’s 11 not ideal. I mean, I I’ve looked back on it and been like, yeah that was not really 12 the ideal situation and. Emotions get involved no matter how much you like to 13 pretend it’s not a big deal (I: umhum) So. But. Yeah I mean, yeah, that’s what I 14 think on it. It’s just, everybody tries it and. (I: umhum) 15 Z: umhum (1) 16 C: Yeah. (1)

Cody responded that he has had “some experience” (L. 1) with friends with benefits relationships; however his following assessment of them is not clear, initially claiming “it works” (L. 2), then providing a scattered account of them as problematic (L. 2-3). The lack of fluency in the account suggests a certain difficulty talking about friends with benefits relationships: “It works. I mean, it never really. .hh It’s not always ideal, like it it definitely does obstruct things,” (L. 2-3). Finally, he settled on a version of friends with benefits as eventually bound to cause problems, even if it seems to work in the beginning (L. 3-4). At this point, Z jumped in, proposing the “melding” of friendship and romantic relationships as the problem. He was clearly offering this as an explanation, because he began his account with a contracted version of “because” (L. 5). Z continued to work up the problem with “melding” these two types of relationships, succinctly dismissing it with great emphasis as “a half-assed romance” and “a half-assed friendship,” (L. 8). In doing so, Z implicitly accused those who participate in such relationships of being negligent on two counts, and in doing so, implicitly challenged Cody’s moral status. Here, Cody interrupted Z to provide an account that is less morally questionable. While he described the situation as “not ideal” (L. 11&12), he used the passive tense to

describe how “emotions get involved” (L. 12), removing any sense of ownership and therefore accountability for the emotions or the actions they presumably led to. He also constructed this as happening “no matter how much you like to pretend it’s not a big deal” (L12-13), underscoring the inevitability of this fate. Moreover, here, Cody used the general second person, implying the sentiment to be a common one; and therefore having believed “it’s not a big deal” (and by extension having participated in a friends with benefits relationship) becomes a normal, if unfortunate, experience (i.e., not something which undermines his status in particular as a moral person). Likewise, Cody accounted further for his own participation in friends with benefits relationships by normalizing the experience (i.e. “everybody tries it”, L. 14). His dismissal of friends with benefits relationships then becomes part of his positioning as a moral person, because “everybody tries it”, learns that it does not work, and then dismisses its plausibility, just as he has done. He therefore positioned himself, just like everybody else, and in doing so protects himself from any further personal moral reproach. Furthermore, in discounting the plausibility of friends with benefits relationships, Cody implicitly situated sexual behaviour squarely beyond friendship. Additionally, since he positioned his dismissal of these relationships as something everybody would do, he situated sexual behaviour beyond friendship in a clearly normative way. Even when they did not have to account for having personally participated in friends with benefits relationships, however, participants still constructed their moral selves, in their discussions of such relationships, the way that Andrew and Taylor did. They began by explicitly denying, together, the existence of friends-with-benefits relationships. Taylor’s suggestion that the fact of “getting to the point where you have friends with benefits” (L. 5-6) is only possible for a relationship already constituted as “obviously more than just friends” (L. 6). This preserved distinct categories of friendship and romantic/sexual relationship. Taylor did not offer any explanation of why this might be the case, he simply treated this view as a self-evident truth, and Andrew supported him verbally as he did.

As an interviewer, however, I probed the declaration, asking Taylor to explain what he claimed to be obvious: 1 A: There’s no such thing as just friends= 2 T: =exactly= 3 A: =with benefits. [… ] 4 […] 5 T: I think if you’re getting to that, if you’re getting to that point where, you 6 have a friend, friends with benefits like. There’s obviously more than just friends 7 there I think 8 [ 9 A: Oh yeah. 10 I: Why do you say that? 11 [ 12 T: at least for one of th-. At least for one of the people. 13 I: Why do you say that? Why is it so obvious? (2) 14 T: Cus if uh, if I, if I didn’t have any like sexual attraction to a girl and I= 15 [ 16 A: it’s 17 T: = was just friends with her? (I: umhum) I wouldn’t ask her to start hooking 18 up with me, just because. Just because I wanted a piece I guess. 19 A: Yeah, well. (3)

Taylor responded bluntly in the first person, that he would not ask a girl for whom he felt no sexual attraction to “start hooking up with” him simply because he “wanted a piece” (L. 17-18). In doing so, he positioned himself as a moral person, drawing on the version of friendship as being without ulterior motives (particularly regarding sex), and distancing himself from someone who would use a friend for sex. However, in specifying a friend toward whom he was not sexually attracted, he also drew an implicit distinction between desiring sex, and desiring sex from a particular person. In line with the moral imperative that friends not use friendship for personal gain (discussed above), Taylor’s words constructed using a friend for sex as reprehensible to a degree that should be obvious to anyone. Accordingly, he avoided condemning people who do participate in friends-with-benefits relationships simply as bad friends because in his account, at least one person wants the relationship to be “more than just friends”, and indeed in fact in any friends with benefits situation, the relationship has already moved beyond friendship. After all, according to his account, friends with benefits behave the

78 way they do because one or both want(s) to be with the other person sexually, and not because they merely want sex. Importantly participants did not simply condemn friends-with-benefits relationships, but instead suggested a diversity of accounts explaining them, for the most part speaking generally. In responding to the exception that proves the rule, these conversational moves clearly rejected the friends-with-benefits idea as a viable possibility for a stable and healthy relationship, thereby protecting the clear binary distinction between friendship and romantic relationships. Furthermore, by discounting friends-with- benefits in particular, participants reinforced the proscription against sexual behaviour within friendship. Conclusion. While participants generally situated sexual behaviour beyond friendship, they managed attraction between friends in a variety of ways according to the local context of the conversation and of participants’ constructions of themselves as moral persons. Specifically, participants constructed versions of friendship that allowed them to manage their own moral accountability. In doing so, they constructed versions of a highly moral friendship in which friends must not have ulterior motives underlying their friendship; as well as versions of friendship lacking (or possessing) special qualities in contrast with the normatively privileged (monogamous) romantic partnership. Throughout the course of the interview, participants engaged in significant conversational work in order to construct and preserve friendship and romantic relationships as distinct categories of relationships. As evidenced by discussion of friends-with-benefits relationships, they did a great deal of accounting in order to maintain this distinction when it was not self-evident. In doing so, the participants constructed friendship in several ways, and themselves as moral persons in the process. They positioned themselves morally in the midst of this conversational work, drawing heavily on cultural discourses of presumed heterosexuality and prescribed monogamy in romantic relationships.

79 CHAPTER FOUR: DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS

Throughout the research conversations, participants constructed friendship and distinguished it from romantic partnership in many ways, drawing on cultural resources, positioning themselves morally within conversation and even performing their own friendships with each other in their talk. In this chapter, I will explore the implications of participants’ friendship performances during what I labelled friend moments in my analysis. I will then discuss the theoretical implications of observing this performance in the research conversation; followed by a consideration of friendship as morally relevant. Next, I will examine the role played by both sexual attraction and desire, and the privileging of romantic relationships, in participants’ constructions of friendship and romantic partnership as separate relationship categories. I will subsequently expand upon the scope and limitations of my project; succeeded by an elaboration of some directions for future research, derived from the participants’ privileging of romantic relationships and their drawing heavily on cultural prescriptions of monogamy. Finally, I will contemplate what my analysis revealed overall about the significance of friendship. The Relational Performance of Friendship

While all friend-pairs declared themselves to be friends explicitly in order to participate in this study, the participants actively performed their friendship throughout the course of the interviews. I have argued in my analysis that participants did so in particular through a series of distinctive interactions that I have called friend moments, which provide a way of identifying friendship through language patterns. Specifically, the participants positioned themselves as “insiders” (i.e., friends) drawing on locally shared resources (not shared by myself as an interviewer), thereby positioning me, as an outsider (i.e., not a friend). During these moments, both participants and myself as an interviewer oriented to the exclusivity of the interaction, marked by myself (despite being an interviewer) remaining quiet, and also by what the participants themselves explained or/and left unexplained. During these moments, the participants and myself all violated the subject positions of interviewer and interviewee that we otherwise took up in the research

80 conversation. Importantly, the friend moments cannot be explained either by the interview conversation as a context, or by me as a third party “outsider” actually being an interviewer. Consequently, it is only reasonable to assume that friend moments might occur similarly outside of research conversations. Specifically, even outside of an interview context, there is every reason to believe that people who share local resources position themselves in conversation with respect to any others (e.g., strangers) who do not, including implicit or absent third parties. Accordingly, friend moments illustrate the performance of something (i.e., friendship) that is constructed not only within an interview, but is constructed in the same way in the larger social world as well. Clearly, what constitutes a “locally shared resource” is context-dependent, which means that friendship must itself be both variable and relational. Viewing “friend” as a potential identity, this construction through insiderness— with respect to the outsiderness of a third party and contextually local resources— is problematic for the pervading individualistic notion of identity within social psychology as something internal and stable. However, this relational fluidity of friendship and friend-identity inferred from friend moments works well within the social constructionist framework adopted in this project. As Sarbin (1997) explained: From the standpoint of the social constructionist, one’s identity is comprised of voiced and unvoiced answer to the ever-present question: who am I? [i.e. a friend.] A moment’s reflection on this premise leads to the inference that the form of the answer is dictated by the social context, by the usually unvoiced answers to the reciprocal question: who are you? [i.e., not a friend] (p.68, notes added)

In this case, friendship, or more specifically, the self as a friend is an excellent example of Gergen’s (1997) idea of the self as constituted by relationships. For the purposes of this project, I approached friendship as a performance, and so my being able to isolate and characterise this performance in the participants’ talk, while important, is not altogether unexpected. Understanding friendship as a performance is therefore plausible; however, this cannot and is not meant to imply that performance, or the performance of friend moments in particular, can explain friendship entirely. Instead, this suggests that viewing friendship as an active performance is in fact a viable alternative to viewing friendship as stable and objective (discussed as problematic in the

81 literature review). Similarly, this suggests that theories of friendship should account for, and perhaps even begin with the idea of active situated interactions. Friendship is fundamentally relational not only because it involves by definition a relationship between two people, but more importantly in a non-trivial sense, as constituted with respect to other friends, to strangers and to everyone else. In exploring friend moments, although I have focused on how the participants performed their friendship in the interview context, this does not mean that the performance of friendship is separate from the constructions of what friendship is. On the contrary, while participants were performing their friendship in friend moments, they simultaneously constructed friendship as a category of human experience and the friend / partner distinction by drawing on particular discursive resources and subject positions (discussed in detail in the second section of my analysis). Conversely, the participants’ performances of friendship were also part of their more general constructions of friendship. Moreover, what the participants did in order to perform friendship reveals much about what constitutes friendship. For instance, not only is friendship inherently actively interactional and relational, but friendship involves being able to take certain things for granted (i.e., a shared personally relevant context and resources). Furthermore, in performing friendship, the participants privileged their subject positions as friends over their subject positions as research participants, despite being in an interview context in the presence of an interviewer. Taking these two features of the research conversations into consideration will be helpful in guiding further psychological inquiry and theorising related to friendship. Usefulness of the Research Interview

The friend moments of participants in this study inform a debate regarding the usefulness of discourse analysis as a method for analysing research conversations, namely pertaining to the application of findings to social interactions outside a research context. As many researchers have noted (e.g., Edwards & Stokoe, 2004; Potter, 2003; Potter & Hepburn, 2005), interviews and focus groups are particular conversational contexts with their own characteristics and norms, and so extrapolating findings from a research conversation (likely focused on a particular topic) to the larger “natural” social

82 world, where interactions could happen differently, could be problematic. Unfortunately, usable examples of conversations in the social world outside of research laboratories are rare, and do not afford researchers much choice of subject matter. While Potter (1999; 2003) has called for discursive psychologists to use “natural talk” (i.e., data that is not generated for research purposes), and Potter and Hepburn (2005) have been outwardly critical of using interview data, some of these criticisms pertain more to how the data are used and not the fact that they are used at all. Potter (2003) and Potter and Hepburn (2005) presented critiques that interviews are overused and often difficult to analyse. Similarly, Potter and Hepburn (2005) emphasised that researchers often fail to take into account in their analysis the interview context of their data, or how interviewers and participants hold each other accountable to these positions; and these critiques are well taken. However, responding to this, Smith and Hollway pointed out in their recent commentaries (2005) that discourse analysis on truly natural data is impossible, because there is no such thing as a “natural” transcript or recording. Ultimately, the outcome of this debate seems to be a critical consciousness raising with respect to the way discursive researchers approach data and data collection, and to the application of their conclusions. In response to this debate, there is a shift in some more recent discursive work toward more “natural” interaction settings (Potter, 2003), specifically institutional settings (e.g., help lines, counselling, etc.), which also coincides with discursive psychologists borrowing from the conversation analytic tradition, particularly the focus on participants’ orientations to institutional identities and goals (Potter, 1999). Furthermore, it has become commonplace for discourse analysts using research conversations either to argue for the “naturalness” of their data (discussed by Edwards & Stokoe, 2004) or to provide arguments suggesting that conversational features relevant to the analysis are brought into the research interview (e.g., routine familiarity associated with couples, discussed by Seymour-Smith & Wetherell, 2006). Seymour-Smith and Wetherell also concluded their article with a general statement about interviews being useful for “demonstrating the mundane ways relationships are performed” (p.124).

83 In this project, I have isolated from these research conversations a distinct kind of talk (i.e., friend moments), in much the same way that Hepburn and Potter (2007) explored a peculiar form of talk (i.e., “tearful” talk) from “natural” conversations recorded from a child protection hotline. Specifically, there is every reason to believe that the conversational processes involved in friend moments are not specific to the interview context and instead extend into the larger social world. Friend moments, and the performance of friendship, then, seem a good example of a discursive analytic finding from a research conversation, applicable outside the interview room. One of the other problems that Potter and Hepburn (2005) ascribed to the interview context was the likelihood (or inevitability) of researchers “flooding” their interviews with the “agendas and categories” of social sciences. Specifically, the interviewer is liable to bring to the interview certain discursive resources and ways of talking about things. Potter and Hepburn called for interviewers and researchers to be critically aware of what they bring to the interview context. Smith (2005), however, responded to this criticism, pointing out that although interviews might (and do) present participants with certain ways of taking about things, and things to talk about, the interviews are nonetheless useful for studying how participants make sense of all this in conversation. In my project, I introduced participants to the research conversation in a particular way, presented them with a conversation guide, and in the course of the interview asked them questions. I clearly had an agenda, guided by my research question. However, focusing on what the participants did with the topics on the conversation guide, and how they reacted when I challenged them, and what the participants accounted for even when I did not, meant that my agenda was part of the interview context and not something infecting it. There were moments in the interaction where the conversational moves were largely governed by (and explainable by referring to) the interview context and myself as an interviewer. For instance, responding to the topic of sexual orientation in friendship listed on the conversation guide, many participants immediately proclaimed that they had a gay friend or that they would not have a problem having a gay friend, discounting any

84 potential labelling of themselves as homophobic. This move is not unexpected in an institutional setting where explicit discrimination based on sexual orientation is not permitted. The participants and I all drew on the discourses which constitute a university, such as the subject positions of student and researcher, and the notion of informed consent. In taking up a researcher subject position, I aligned myself with the institutional discourses of a university. However, this was not my research question; and more to the point, the participants did construct friendship in ways that were contextualised but not dictated by the interview. In particular, the participants went to great lengths to maintain a separation between friendship and romantic relationships, whether I asked them about the difference between a friend and a partner, or whether I asked them about the idea of a partner as a friend. Moreover, in the process, they drew very heavily on a prescription of monogamy in romantic relationships which did not come from me, and in fact took me quite by surprise. Similarly, the participants constructed a version of friendship without ulterior motives (also not suggested by anything in the interview context), often using this to help maintain a clear distinction between friendship and romantic relationships when this distinction was potentially challenged by their allowing for attraction in friendship. Ultimately, by taking the interview context into account, I was able to gain some insight into how participants constructed friendship and the friend / partner distinction, and how they positioned themselves morally in doing so. Friendship as Morally Relevant

Participants drew heavily on a version of friendship which holds friends (as friends) to a particular moral standard of acting without ulterior motives (i.e., not acting for personal gain). The version of friendship without ulterior motives echoes cultural resources like proverbs (e.g., “a friend in need is a friend indeed) and pejorative labels (e.g., “fair-weather friend”) that take friendship as their topic. Similarly, in taking up the topic of friendship in his book Friendship, Altruism and Morality Lawrence Blum (1980) argued that friendship has moral significance, namely because friendship love can be (deliberately) directed non-instrumentally toward the good of a friend (Badhwar, 1998).

85 Thus, the broad context of Western culture supports meanings of friendship that are associated with moral prescriptions and obligations, providing the discursive resources upon with my participants drew in their talk. Theorists who hold conversation to be the foundational substance of the social world (e.g., Harré, 1992; Shotter, 1992) and have informed discursive psychology argue that in general people position themselves morally in their talk by the subject positions they take up. Specifically, people’s positions in conversation— whether given by another speaker or taken up personally— specify not only personal attributes of the speaker but moral ones as well (Harré & Van Langenhove, 1992). As people generate meaning together socially in conversation, they hold each other accountable, and in doing so, produce morally relevant prescriptions and proscriptions governing how people are supposed to be and behave (Gergen & Walter, 1998). What people are called on (or volunteer) to explain and justify in their accounts when constructing friend relationships, for example, and the resources they draw on while doing so provide insight into the implicit moral order(s) to which people are orienting. Consequently, in focussing on how people construct friendship and themselves as friends, I have also studied aspects of a larger cultural moral order, namely how people construct themselves as moral beings. Harré and Van Langenhove (1992) noted: “It is often sufficient to refer to the roles people occupy within a given moral order or to certain institutional aspects of social life to make actions intelligible and to understand the positions that people take” (p. 397). Referring to morally sanctioned positions is precisely what participants in my study were doing when they privileged romantic partnerships above friendship, or referred to a norm of monogamy as a way of distinguishing between friendship and romantic relationships. From this perspective, the subject position of “friend” is inherently morally relevant and friendship as an important social category in Western society is constructed as fundamentally moral in nature and associated with particular obligations and responsibilities (although this does not necessarily correspond to a static, stable or coherent moral code). Clearly, psychological theories of friendship (and of close personal relationships, in general) need to be able to address morality in friendship in some way, and

86 consequently, further investigation into the moral aspects of friendship is warranted. Specifically, the study of friendship (particularly given the lack of coherent friendship theorising) would benefit from an inductive process, gathering data first, and then building a theory based on them. In such a project, it would be of utmost importance for researchers to consider their impact on the data, not only through the questions they pose but how they seek to answer them, trying to make their own assumptions about friendship explicit in order to observe beyond them, and to be open to results that might not be expected. For example, one recent conversation analytic study of pre-adolescent girls’ friendships revealed, among other things, how the girls justified not the exclusion of the girls who were positioned in the conversation as “bad friends”, but instead the exclusion of others on the basis that they resisted or refused to take up subject positions as “bad friends” when others positioned them in this way (Evaldsson, 2007). Thus, in constructing theories of friendship, methodologies that are commonly classified as qualitative, including discourse analysis, offer a promising alternative to the more traditional, quantitative approaches which currently dominate the field. Sexual Desire and Behaviour, and the Distinction Between Friend and Partner Participants performed extensive conversational work in order to maintain a distinction between friendship and romantic relationships, even when this distinction was challenged by topics on the conversation guide, and by myself more directly. That participants often referred to sexual behaviour and attraction in order to construct friendship and romantic partnerships as different kinds of relationships was not surprising, given the social psychological literature on friendship. The assumption that (hetero)sexual desire and behaviour can account for the friend / partner distinction appears to be implicit if not explicit in much of this research, e.g., in investigations of how (cross-gender) friends deal with attractions while managing to remain friends (e.g., DeLucia-Waack, Gerrity, Taub & Baldo, 2001; Guerrero & Chavez, 2005); in studies exploring the differences between same-gender and cross-gender friendships of heterosexual people (e.g., DeLucia-Waack, Gerrity, Taub & Baldo, 2001; Guerrero & Chavez, 2005; Meschke & Silbereisen, 1997); and in researchers’ puzzling over friends with benefits relationships (e.g., Giordano, Manning & Longmore, 2006; Hughes,

87 Morrison & Asada, 2005). However, how participants drew on sexual attraction and behaviour in constituting friendship and romantic relationships as separate relationship categories varied depending on the local conversational context. In drawing on sex (as a desire, a practice and a topic of conversation), the participants positioned themselves as moral persons in the conversation; or perhaps more accurately, they drew on sex discursively in constructing friendship as distinct from romantic partnerships specifically in the service of constructing themselves as moral persons. Furthermore, participants also constructed the difference between friendship and romantic relationships in other ways, drawing heavily on the cultural prescription of monogamy in romantic relationships (but not friendship), and the normative privileging of romantic relationships above friendship. Moreover, the participants also explored the differences between friendship and romantic relationships as a way of working up versions of friendship, both as lacking something special that romantic relationships have, and also as being uniquely governed by a moral obligation to act in friendship without ulterior motives (particularly with respect to sexual gratification). The association of sex, in any sense of the word, only with romantic relationships cannot alone account for the rich discursive resources the participants drew on when constructing these relationships, nor does it acknowledge that participants constructed much more than their own friendships. In fact, at times participants constructed versions of attraction in friendship and managed these accounts while still maintaining a clear distinction between friendships and romantic relationships. The absence of a sexual dimension in friendship is therefore not a definitional criterion, but a moral one instead, to be to taken up in varying ways. Throughout the conversation, the participants were constantly orienting to moral concerns in how they positioned themselves, and while constructing their identities, as friends, as women and men, as heterosexual and monogamous, and ultimately as moral persons. Sexual attraction, desire and behaviour do not lie at the root of the friend / romantic partner distinction, but instead are merely discursive tools, among other tools, employed in its construction.

88 Privileging Romantic Partnerships Over Friendships

The participants in this study engaged in significant conversational manoeuvring in order to construct friendship and romantic relationships as separate relationship categories. They frequently did so through privileging monogamous (and ultimately long- term) romantic relationships above friendships, which is similar to the heightened importance participants placed on romantic partners as compared to friends in Fehr and Harasymchuck’s (2005) study. Furthermore, the participants in my study positioned themselves with respect to this prioritisation not simply normatively, but morally as well. Their doing so is an example of the prioritising that bell hooks (2000) depicted as problematic, for several reasons, in her book About Love. She affirmed that friendship is important in and of itself: Often we take friendships for granted even when they are the interactions where we experience mutual pleasure. We place them in a secondary position, especially in relation to romantic bonds. This devaluation of our friendships creates an emptiness we may not see when we are devoting all our attention to finding someone to love romantically or giving all our attention to a chosen loved one. (p. 134-135)

She went on to argue that this ranking of romantic relationships unquestionably above friendships is conducive to developing unhealthy romantic relationships (i.e., where a partner becomes overly socially dependent upon the other partner and the relationship), and significantly predisposes people (particularly women) to remain in romantic partnerships even when these relationships are abusive. She explored this in the context of her own experience in a long-term abusive relationship: I had been raised conventionally to believe this [her longest romantic relationship, which was also an abusive relationship] relationship was “special” and should be revered above all. Most women and men born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriage and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. (p. 136, note added)

Hooks elaborates the dangers of this particular discourse, tying it to socialisation during a particular time period. Importantly, participants in this study, who were all young adults born at least thirty years later, drew on this same discourse, illustrating the way

89 “discourses do not just disappear or stop functioning” (Taylor, 2001b, p.317) but instead may be taken up differently over time, along with other discourses. While much has undoubtedly changed since the 1950s, potentially damaging discourses cannot be disregarded as impotent and obsolete. Young adults are still constructing their friendships and romantic relationships as distinctive by drawing on discourses which prioritise romantic relationships over friendship; and related or not, intimate partner violence is still a problem, with 7% of women in Canada reporting being victims of spousal assault within the last five years (Statistics Canada, 1999), and 58% of women over the age of 18 in Alberta reporting having sustained at least one form of intimate partner violence (Statistics Canada, 1993). At times, participants weighed the potential costs and benefits of changing a friendship into a romantic relationship, ascribing to friendship some intrinsic worth. Thus, they did not dismiss friendship as worthless, and on the contrary, they worked up versions of friendship as valuable. Consequently, participants did not distinguish between friendship and romantic relationships on the basis of friendship having no value. Although participants often did draw on the normative privileging of romantic partnership, like the presence of sexual desire and behaviour, in order to construct the difference between friendship and romantic relationships, this privileging does not define the distinction. Scope and Limitations of My Project

The conversation guide presented to participants dealt with matters of sexuality which is potentially a sensitive topic. Participants volunteered to take part in a study about friendship, which is arguably a relatively safe topic of conversation, particularly as compared with sexuality and friends with benefits relationships that were listed on the conversation guide. Since friends with benefits relationship and sexual attraction in friendship were both listed on the recruitment posters, it is unlikely that anyone who was overly uncomfortable dealing with these topics would have volunteered as a participant. Regardless, as an interviewer, especially when dealing with conversational topics with the potential to make people uneasy, it is important to pay attention to how the participants seem to be responding in the conversation.

90 While I did do my best to avoid placing any participants in uncomfortable situations, different pairs of friends seemed to be comfortable talking about different things, and I am an inexperienced interviewer. Navigating between asking for information that participants simply have not given, and picking up on what people wish to avoid, is something I feel I did adequately in my interviews, but which requires perpetual vigilance, and which I can stand to improve upon. In conducting interviews, in order to be an ethical researcher, it is important to treat participants respectfully, and to try as much as possible to avoid causing any distress or discomfort. In a research context, the subject position of interviewer involves facilitating (and therefore controlling) the conversation, just as the subject position of participant involves complying with participation; and so as the interviewer I had more power within the conversation than my participants. Because of this, it was incumbent upon me to be careful not to misuse this power, even accidentally. This was for both ethical and practical reasons, i.e., discourse analysts are interested in the participants’ concerns more so than the researchers’ concerns. I was mindful of this in conducting my interviews, and this can be seen at several points in various interviews. For instance, I responded to particular participant statements with delayed or very minimal acknowledgement, suggesting an implicit (ideological) disagreement that I did not articulate explicitly. In this way, I avoided positioning my participants as “sexist” or “homophobic” or as something otherwise undesirable. Thus, my impact, as researcher, on the data can be viewed as not only constraining in terms of the questions asked, and so on, but also as productive in terms of providing the conversational space for participants to orient to concerns that I might not share. Although the participants did largely engage with me while I was positioned as a researcher and an interviewer, they also responded to me otherwise. In outward appearance, I am visibly female-bodied, and at times the participants positioned me very distinctly in a clearly gendered way (often themselves taking up gendered positions) and responding to me accordingly. Sometimes this was very explicit, with one pair of friends explaining to me that there are certain things (such as the behaviour of the mutual friend they were describing very vaguely) that they would only talk about with guys. At other

91 times, this was much less obvious. These gender-related performances would be of utmost significance in studying issues pertaining to gender in friendship. As is, I did not address gender directly in my analysis, primarily due to practical limitations: my interviews provided me with very rich data, and I could not explore everything. Another researcher with a different analytical focus might have explored different aspects of participants’ constructions of friendship. This does not undermine the importance of my analysis or my conclusions, but instead highlights that people do a great many things in their conversations about friendship (or any conversations); and in this project I have explored some of them. It is noteworthy that the participants in my study were all either currently or formerly students at an Alberta post secondary institution, suggesting that they were probably well educated within the Western intellectual tradition, and likely also to have been of middle or upper socio-economic status. All but one spoke English as a first language. The version of friendship without ulterior motives that participants constructed undoubtedly mirrors the specific philosophical tradition I previously mentioned, reflecting their own specific socio-cultural and historical context. Individuals are immersed in social processes from which they cannot be extricated (Gergen, 1997), and “whatever we might say (and think) about ourselves and others as people will always be in terms of a language provided for us by history” (Edley, 2001, p. 210). Accordingly, while individuals skilfully employ cultural resources or discourses to their own ends, to construct themselves and their relationships, they must draw from an order of possibilities which exist socially in language (Shotter, 1997). However, the question remains regarding whose social reality will be represented? The participants in this project come from a very specific (and privileged) segment of a particular Canadian society. While I made a concerted effort to include participants and friend pairs so as to represent some diversity in gender and sexual orientation, aiming for a level of variability in the accounts that would be both manageable and relevant to my research questions, I did not recruit participants specifically to represent diversity in culture, ethnicity and race, religion, language, and socio-economic class, for instance. Doing so would have entailed not just an

92 unmanageable amount of variability, but more importantly, an unmanageable amount of data. Consequently, there are peoples and therefore discourses about friendship which remain unexplored; and the study of friendship would benefit from investigating how people who are not well-educated, Alberta residents (from presumably economically privileged backgrounds) construct friendship. Moreover, I conducted my interviews with English-speaking participants, in English, and given the primacy of language in a reality which is primarily conversational, my analysis is likely to be of limited applicability to non-English speaking people. As Shotter (1992) argued, different cultures will in fact have ontologically different social realities, and so non-English speaking people will likely construct different realities of friendship; although I would expect some commonalities among cultures which access the same movies, music, and other media. While the participants in this study do not represent everyone, there is no a priori reason to believe that people who differ according to the criteria listed above (with the exception of language) will construct different versions of friendship than did the participants in this study, because it is not clear a priori which differences will be relevant conversationally. Nevertheless, there is also no reason to believe that people who differ greatly from the participants in this study will construct friendship and the distinction between friendship and romantic relationships in the same ways and draw on the same resources as my participants. There are undoubtedly other versions of friendship to be worked up within other traditions, and in any event, people will draw on the resources available to them in flexible ways when constructing their friendships and themselves as moral beings within them. The participants in my study were all unmarried young adults. Worldwide, (heterosexual) marriage is a pervasive and normative practice among adults, explicitly regulated by governments and religious institutions, and in most places monogamous by definition. Specifically, people who are married have a monogamous romantic partnership distinguished legally from their other relationships. My participants’ constructions of friendship and the distinction between friendship and romantic relationships concerned both monogamy and the prioritising of romantic relationships above friendship. Because of this, there is reason to believe that people who are married,

93 or whose social lives involve a large portion of married peers, might construct their friendships and romantic relationships differently than the participants in my study, perhaps aided by more relevant discourses of marriage. Discourse analysis has been criticized for relying on the argument that because participants use a particular discursive practice, this practice is available to people in the same social category as the participants, without being able to specify what this category is (Hammersley, 2003). This same critique also implies that analyses of people from one walk of life (e.g., the participants in this study) would not be applicable to everyone else. However, as Hammersley also noted, the purpose of discourse analysis is not to infer what everyone does, but instead to identify the discourses that people are drawing on in particular ways for particular purposes. This applies here, because my goal was never to uncover all of the discursive resources that people draw on to construct their friendships and themselves as friends, nor to be able to say what all people draw on. Instead, my analysis identified how the participants constructed themselves as friends, not only through particular interaction patterns (i.e., friend moments) but also in terms of the resources they drew on and the subject positions they took up. The point is that the resources upon which the participants drew must be available for others as well. My analysis, therefore, represents certain aspects of a larger social reality. Nevertheless, as any single project will only be able to tell part of the (perhaps ever-changing) story, there is certainly reason for more investigation into friendship. Ultimately, it will be important to make sense of this multiplicity for a more thorough understanding of friendship. Future Directions

The participants in my study oriented to several normative discourses such as the privileging of romantic relationships above friendship and the prescription of monogamy in romantic relationships. In this subsection, I will discuss two relatively recent alternative ways of doing relationships (i.e., with respect to asexuality and polyamory), which challenge these normative discourses, exploring their implications for the construction of friendship and the distinction between friendship and romantic relationships.

94 Asexuality and the discursive landscape of friendship. People position themselves as moral beings through their privileging of romantic relationships above friendship. As in my earlier discussion of sexual desire and behaviour as rhetorical tools, romantic relationships are also privileged in the psychology literature where it is claimed that the primary attachment figure in adult relationships is typically a romantic partner (Hazan & Shaver, 1994). This implicit devaluing of friendship is bound to have negative consequences for adults whose primary relationships are not with a romantic partner, but instead with a friend, for example people who take up the position of “friend-focused” asexual. “Friend-focused” is a label adopted by (asexual) people who organise their social lives around friendships, which they value highly, instead of around a romantic relationship as is more conventional (Jay, 2007). The prevalence of asexual people, that is people who position themselves as not experiencing sexual attraction, is estimated to be somewhere between 1% (Bogeart, 2004) and 4% (Poston and Baumle, 2006) of the general population. Boegeart (2006) and Prause and Graham (2007), have distinguished asexuality from the DSM diagnosis of HSDD (Hyposexual Desire Disorder), discussing asexuality as a sexual orientation. From a discursive perspective, people who position themselves as asexual are forging their own resisting discourses in a social context where people often construct friendship through a morally sanctioned prioritisation of romantic relationships, which are generally presumed to entail sexual desire (Gabb, 2001). In this way, people positioned as asexual are clearly resisting the construction of friendship and romantic relationships as separate categories, challenging both the normative privileging of romantic partnership and the necessity of sexual attraction and desire within those relationships. For instance, an asexual couple (Karl and Victoria Glancetts) explained in a recent documentary how their non-sexual marriage is often dismissed and devalued by others because as far as many people seem to be concerned, “it’s not a real relationship if you’re not having sex” (The Asexual Couple, 2006, approximately 8 minutes and 30 seconds). Of particular relevance to my project, Mr. and Mrs. Glancetts also explored what marks friendship and romantic relationships as distinct forms of relationship, challenging the distinction itself.

95 Here they echo a plethora of discussion threads on the AVEN and APositive online message boards where people explore definitions of friendship and romantic relationships, and their related confusion. From a discursive perspective, one might argue that people positioned as asexual are simply not able to draw on the same cultural resources that other people use to construct their close personal relationships, and those positioned as friend-focused in particular must deal with their most important relationships (i.e., their friendships) being devalued and/or dismissed. Consequently, the asexual community is one discursive space where people are actively involved in creative discussion (Jay, 2007), generating new ways of constructing their relationships and new discursive resources with which to do so, rendering otherwise non-normative relationships intelligible, at least within a particular context. Discursive psychology takes the generation of this kind of discourse seriously. Human conversation is after all the primary human reality (Shotter, 1992). Moreover, it is this discursive reality, in fact discourse itself, which produces and sustains persons (Harré, 1992; Stenner & Eccleston, 1994). In Potter’s words, discourse is both “constructed and constructive” (2003, p.76). The words that people use to talk about relationships can change the discursive landscape of those relationships, altering what they mean and therefore what they are all about (Bradac, 1983). I have already discussed how the constructions of friendship that people draw on are limited by what is possible in a particular socio-cultural historical context. It is precisely this finiteness, the limitations social context imposes, which permits people, identities and social life more generally to be intelligible (Butler, 2004). This means that in generating “new” discourses of friendship and of relationships in general, people positioned as asexual are making themselves intelligible (and therefore real) in a literal sense. To be unintelligible is to be positioned as an outsider to humanity, against which human subjects are formed (Butler, 1990). So in generating intelligibility, people positioned as asexual are creating themselves as subjects, making it possible for themselves to be possible, through their conversations about, and constructions of, friendship. More importantly, it means that through this large-scale and active generation of new discourses, people positioned as asexual are potentially changing the available

96 meanings of friendship and romantic partnership. Clearly, they will face certain resistance in doing so (e.g., the DSM diagnosis that some academics are arguing should not be applied), but the potential impact of the asexual community on the meaning of friendship cannot be dismissed. Further investigation of asexuality and the challenges that people positioned as asexual face in constructing their own relationships is sure to provide insight into friendship and the distinction between friendship and romantic relationships. Polyamory, and monogamy as a moral resource in the distinction between friend and partner. In constructing the distinction between friendship and romantic partnerships, participants in my study drew extensively on a normative moral prescription of monogamy in romantic relationships, frequently relying on the presumption of romantic or sexual monogamy in order to position themselves as moral persons in their constructions of friendship. One thing that really struck me was how deeply and pervasively they drew on monogamy in romantic relationships, not only as a cultural norm but also as a free (or at least inexpensive) pass for moral positioning within the constructions of friendship and the friend / partner distinction. Because monogamy is such a powerful norm, one might expect it to be problematic for individuals who engage in openly non-monogamous romantic relationships. Polyamory is a label for responsible non-monogamy, popularised over the past decade (Barker, 2005), describing individuals who may have multiple committed romantic partnership (and whose partners might do the same). The little academic research into polyamory that has been conducted presents openly non-monogamous romantic partnerships as a viable form of healthy relationship (e.g., Ho, 2006; Jackson & Scott, 2004; LaSala, 2004a, 2004b; Worth, Reid & McMillan, 2002); and encourages counsellors and family therapists to be flexible around ideas of sexual monogamy and commitment (Shernoff, 2006; LaSalle, 2001). Consequently, the normative moral prescription of monogamy in romantic relationships upon which the participants drew does not appear to coincide with non-monogamy being in any way inherently harmful; and its emphasis in discourses of love may actually hinder the development of satisfactory intimate relationships (Charles, 2002).

97 As polyamory pertains to my project, if people draw on monogamy as a way of organising (and in some situations prioritising) their relationships into categories of friendship and romantic relationships, and more importantly in doing so constructing themselves as moral persons, then one might expect that people who reject monogamy in their relationships would have to do additional conversational work, such as drawing on supplementary resources, in order to account for their relationships and themselves within them as moral persons. In fact, Ritchie and Barker (2005) documented the generation of new words and identity categories in polyamory-related self-help books and online communications. Similarly, during research interviews, people positioned as polyamorous and bisexual distinguished their romantic relationships from their friendship by ascribing special (non-exclusive) commitment-related qualities to their romantic partnerships (Klesse, 2005). In doing so, they not only maintained a clear distinction between romantic partnerships and friendships but also privileged romantic partnerships above friendships (as participants in my study did), drawing on these two normative discursive tools along with the new discourse of polyamory. This is a kind of creative discourse generation that is similar to the one produced by the asexual community, with individuals positioned as polyamorous creating for themselves at least a local intelligibility, a context where they can be both non-monogamous and moral (i.e., as polyamorous). As a powerful and effective cultural resource that people draw on in positioning themselves as moral beings, monogamy is frequently used to help construct, but does not predicate, the distinction between a friend and a romantic partner. Just like sexual desire or behaviour and the normative privileging of romantic partnerships, monogamy can be used to account for the distinction in certain contexts, but it does not define the distinction in any categorical way. Friendship and romantic relationships can be socially constructed in varied ways depending on the conversational context. The implications of these alternative subject positions. Individuals positioned as asexual or polyamorous are engaging in extensive discussions about friendship and about the distinction between friendship and romantic partnerships. These discussions reveal much about how friendship and the friendship / romantic partner distinction are

98 constructed, because in resisting normative discourses, and in constructing themselves as moral beings in creative new ways, individuals positioned as asexual or polyamorous orient to the cultural resources and moral imperatives that might otherwise remain implicit. Consequently, further research into polyamory, like asexuality, would provide further insight into people’s constructions of friendship and the distinction between friendship and romantic partnerships. Conclusions

In their construction of friendship, participants drew on a version of friendship without ulterior motivations, a prescription of monogamy in romantic partnerships and a normative privileging of romantic relationships above friendships. Through these constructions, they constituted friendship and romantic relationships as distinctly separate, while also positioning themselves as moral persons in the conversation and in their relationships. While they were doing so, they performed their friendship, played out in friend moments, where participants situated themselves and each other as friends, notably with respect to me (a non-friend). Participants drew on a range of discursive resources to construct a distinction between friendship and romantic partnership; however, they did not base this difference in any single discourse (or combination of discourses). Instead, they constructed versions of friendship as distinct from romantic relationships, whether or not sexual attraction was unique to partner relationships, and no matter which category of relationship they worked up as special or valuable. While I have explored some of how the participants accomplished this distinction, I have only begun to address why (i.e., for what purposes) they have done so. Participants not only constituted themselves as moral persons through their construction of this difference, but more importantly, they also constructed friendship more generally. For example, by privileging romantic partnerships in certain ways, participants implicitly worked up versions of what friendship was lacking (e.g., sexual attraction, an obligation to make time for someone even when busy, or permission to pursue personal gratification). Finally, friendship is something that participants performed (diversely and according to local context), while working up versions of their friendship, and of

99 themselves as moral persons. Presumably, they did so because friendship itself was not only relevant to the interview conversation, but more importantly because it was meaningful to themselves, both morally and personally. Positioning themselves as friends with respect to a stranger (i.e., me), my participants distinguished themselves from me in moments which preceded the interview context, and orienting to resources beyond it. In doing so, they constructed identities they shared with each other exclusively. Ultimately, participants constructed their friendships as valuable, and drew on them not only positioning themselves morally in the conversation, but more to the point, in constituting intelligible, meaningful versions of their selves.

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108 Sharabany, R., Eshel, Y., & Hakim, C. (2008). Boyfriend, girlfriend in a traditional society: Parenting styles and development of intimate friendships among Arabs in school. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 32(1), 66-75. Sharabany, R., Gershoni, R., & Hofman, J.E. (1981). Girlfriend, boyfriend: Age and sex differences in intimate friendship. Developmental Psychology, 17(6), 800-808. Shernoff, M. (2006). Negotiated non-monogamy and male couples. Family Process, 45 (4), 407-418. Shotter, J. (1992). Social constructionism and realism: Adequacy or accuracy. Theory & Psychology, 2(2), 175-182. Shotter, J. (1997). Sociocentric accounts of the mind. Theory & Psychology, 7(3), 422- 424. Smith, J., Hollway, W., Mishler, E.G., Potter, J., & Hepburn, A. (2005). Commentaries on Potter and Hepburn, ‘Qualitative interviews in psychology: problems and possibilities’. Qualitative Research In Psychology, 2, 309-325. Stam, H.J. (2003). Retrieving the past for the future: Boundary maintenance in historical and theoretical psychology. In D.B. Hill & M.J. Kral (Eds.), About Psychology: Essays at the Crossroads of History, Theory, and Philosophy (pp.147-163). Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Statistics Canada. (1993). Violence Against Woman Survey. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. Statistics Canada. (1999). General Social Survey. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. Steglich, C., Snijders, T.A.B., & West, P. (2006). Applying SIENA: An illustrative analysis of the coevolution of adolescents’ friendship networks, taste in music and alcohol consumption. Methodology, 2(1), 48-56. Sternberg, R.J., Hojjat, M., & Barnes, M.L. (2001). Empirical tests of aspects of a theory of love as a story. European Journal of Personality, 15, 199-218. Stenner, P., & Eccleston, C. (1994). On the textuality of being: Toward an invigorated social constructionism. Theory & Psychology, 4(1), 85-103. Stocker, C.M., & Richmond, M.K. (2007). Longitudinal associations between hostility in adolescents’ family relationships and friendships and hostility in their romantic relationships. Journal of Family Psychology, 21(3), 490-497.

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110 APPENDIX A: RPS ONLINE RECRUITMENT POSTING

Study Name Social construction of friendship & the friend / romantic partner distinction (F) Abstract Credit Description Same-gender friends talk about friendship with each other. You will be asked to come in WITH A CLOSE female- gendered FRIEND(been friends at least 1 year). You will have a taperecorded conversation with each other about your experiences with friendship and other close relationships. Credit for both friends if both eligible. Eligibility Participate with a close same-gender (F-F) friend: friends Requirements for at least ONE YEAR. Both must speak English well. Experiences are welcome with friends with benefits and blured friend/romance line. Participants of all sexual orientations welcome. Sign-Up Restrictions You must NOT have signed up or completed ANY of these studies: • Social construction of friendship & the friend / romantic partner distinction (M) • Social construction of friendship & the friend / romantic partner distinction (X) Duration 60 minutes Preparation You and your friend must come together to participate. Credits 1 Credits Researcher Courtney Chasin Office: Admin 255A Phone: 220-6826 Email: [email protected]

Principal Investigator Lorrie RADTKE

Deadlines Sign-Up: 24 hour(s) before the appointment Cancellation: 0 hour(s) before the appointment

Study posting on Research Participation System for same-gender friend-pairs of women.

111 APPENDIX B: RECRUITMENT POSTER

Research Project

Are you between ages 18 and 25?

Do you currently have a close friend with whom you've been friends for at least ONE year? Would you and your friend be interested in coming together to the university to talk about friendship?

I'm a grad student at the University of Calgary doing a research project on friendship. I am looking for pairs of friends, particularly where one or both people have experience with any of the relationships described below.

Have you ever had any of these kinds of relationships?

-- a very close friendship (with someone of any gender) -- a friendship where either you or your friend had romantic or sexual feelings for the other -- a relationship that blurs the lines between friendship and romance -- a “friends with benefits” relationship

Please contact Courtney at [email protected] Or phone (403) 220 - 6826

Participants of all genders and sexual orientations welcome.

112 APPENDIX C: RECRUITMENT HANDBILL

Front:

Are you between ages 18 and 25? (See reverse for details.) Are you interested in participating in a research project on friendship with a friend?

Have you had any of these kinds of relationships? -- a very close friendship (with someone of any gender) -- a friendship where either you or your friend had romantic or sexual feelings for the other -- a relationship that blurs the lines between friendship and romance -- a “friends with benefits” relationship

Participants of all genders and sexual orientations welcome.

Back:

Are you between ages 18 and 25? Do you currently have a close friend with whom you've been friends for at least ONE year? Would you and your friend be interested in coming together to the university to talk about friendship?

Please contact Courtney at [email protected] Or phone (403) 220 - 6826 Participants of all genders and sexual orientations welcome.

113

APPENDIX D: INTRODUCTORY INFORMATION

Introductory Information Script:

Hello. My name is Courtney and I’m a grad student in psychology doing a project on friendship. You’re here today as a pair of friends to participate in this project. First, I would like to confirm with both of you that you’ve been friends for at least one year. Is that correct? I would also like to confirm that you are between 18 and 25 years old. Is that correct?

I’m going to ask you to talk about your experiences with friendships and other close relationships. I’ll give you a conversation guide to start you off, but you don’t need to stick to it, and you don’t need to talk about everything on it. I will be tape recording your conversation and later transcribing it for purposes of the analysis.

Before we get started I’m going to ask you to read and fill out a consent form. Then I’ll give you a short questionnaire asking for some demographic information.

Do you have any questions?

114 APPENDIX E: CONSENT FORM

Consent form, page 1.

115

Consent Form, page 2.

116 APPENDIX F: INTRODUCTION

Introductory Script

This research project is about close friendships. People have many different types of friendships, including close personal relationships. Sometimes people are unsure about the kind of relationship they have with a friend. At times, people may have friendships they consider to be “special” in that they don't fit the stereotypical idea of what friendship is supposed to be like. I'm interested in people's ideas about friendships, their experiences with friendships and how these relationships fit into their everyday lives. I've asked you to come here today to talk about your friendship with each other, as well as other friendship experiences you have had.

This won't be a formal interview, but rather more like an informal conversation. I'd like you to mostly talk with one another about friendship, with my role being mainly to facilitate that conversation and ask questions whenever some clarification or elaboration is needed. Most research on friendship focuses on individuals. I am interested in how friends understand the meaning of friendship within the context of their own friendship and the wide variety of possible friendship relationships. My analysis focuses on what you say and therefore I will audio tape your conversation. Any questions?

117 APPENDIX G: CONVERSATION GUIDE

Conversation Guide

To help you get started, here is a list of specific topics related to friendship. It is not necessary that you talk about all, or even some, of the topics listed below. Please feel free to talk about whatever you think is most interesting or important about friendship. Do not hesitate to talk about anything that you think is relevant to the general topic of friendship, even if it is not on this list.

• How you became friends • The meaning of being close friends • Being uncertain or confused about the type of relationship you have with a friend • Jealousy and friendship — being jealous of your friend’s other relationships or someone else being jealous of your relationship with a friend • Romance and friendship — blurred boundaries • “More than friends”, “just friends”, close friends” • “Liking” someone, “loving” someone, “being in love” • Same-gender friends, other-gender friends • Sexuality and friendship — being straight, gay, lesbian or bisexual (or other) • Experiencing sexual and/or romantic attraction in a friendship • Friends-with-benefits

118 APPENDIX H : LETTER OF INFORMATION

Information Sheet:

Developmental psychologists have studied the implications of friendship during childhood and adolescence for people’s social and psychological lives during adulthood. For instance, friendship in older children is associated with feelings of self-worth and the absence of depression in adulthood, and late adolescent friendships are related to stable romantic partnerships later in life (Hartup & Abecassis, 2002). Primarily, researchers have studied friendship in adulthood in parallel to their study of romantic partnership, because they assume that romantic partnerships are the most important close relationship during adulthood. Some researchers have directly explored romantic and sexual attraction in platonic friendship (eg. Kaplan & Keys, 1997), while others have studied friendship and romantic partnerships together, comparing the two (eg. Aron et al., 1989). Most research on friendship focuses on individuals and addresses the friendships of heterosexual people, making the assumption that same-gender and cross-gender friendships are completely different. However, the common explanation of why people experience why people start having more cross-gender friends in their teenage years (i.e. developing heterosexuality) does not apply to the friendships of gay, lesbian and bisexual people. Furthermore, the simple categories, friendship and romantic partnership, that researchers have used to classify close relationships do not apply to other types of relationships, such as friends with benefits relationships (Hugh, Morrison & Asada, 2005), and passionate friendships (Diamond & Dubé, 2002). One problem is that researchers impose their definitions of close relationships in designing and interpreting their research without considering that those very definitions might be problematic. I am interested in how friends of all sorts understand the meaning of friendship within the context of their own friendship and the wide variety of possible friendship relationships. I will be analyzing your conversation for what you say and how you say it. This approach to research is known as discursive psychology (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). It assumes that we often work out our ideas about concepts, like friendship, in conversation with others where we negotiate meanings and sometimes disagree. In discursive psychology, instead of treating language as a window into people’s thoughts, researchers look at the types of things that people do with language—like, in this case, defining “close” friendship or romantic relationship, or defining themselves as being a certain type of friend. I am talking to many different friend pairs— people of different genders and sexual orientations; cross-gender and same-gender friends— about a wide variety of friendship experiences. I am particularly interested in experiences with relationships that do not neatly fit either stereotypic notions of friendship or stereotypic notions of romantic or sexual relationships. I am looking to address questions like: How do people construct friendship and romantic relationships (and a difference between the two) when they are talking about their close personal relationships? For what purposes and to what effects do they do so? And how do gender, sexual and romantic attraction and sexual orientation figure into young adults’ constructions of friendship and romance? Do you have any questions?

119

If you are interested in reading something relevant to this topic, here are a few suggestions:

Aron, A., Dutton, D.G., Aron, E.N., & Iverson, A. (1989). Experiences of falling in love. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 6, 243-257.

Diamond, L.M., & Dubé, E.M. (2002). Friendship and attachment among heterosexual and sexual-minority youths: Does the gender of your friend matter? Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 3(2), 155-166.

Hartup, W.W., & Abecassis, M. (2002) Friends and Enemies. In P.K. Smith & C.H. Hart (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development (pp. 286-306). Cornwall: Blackwell Publishers.

Hughes, M., Morrison, K., & Asada, K.G.K. (2005). What’s love got to do with it? Exploring the impact of maintenance rules, love attitudes, and network support on friends with benefits relationships. Western Journal of Communication, 69, (1), 49-66.

Kaplan, D.L., & Keys, C.V. (1997). Sex and relationship variables as predictors of sexual attraction in cross-sex platonic friendships between young heterosexual adults. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 14(2), 191-206.

Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour. London: Sage Publications, Ltd.

120 APPENDIX I: TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

Transcription Conventions The transcription conventions below are adapted from Potter and Wetherell (1987).

1) A: It’s not right not right AT ALL underlining = word emphasized words in caps = louder than surrounding talk

2) A: yeah, yeah really? . = end of intonation (not necessarily the end of a sentence) , = continuing intonation ? = rise in intonation (not necessarily marking a question)

3) A: Brian [the speaker’s brother] said [ ] it’s okay [laughs] [words are in here] = clarification or action [ ] = something is deliberately omitted

4) A: I (couldn’t tell you) that B: well you know ( ) ( ) = section of recording is inaudible, unclear and can’t be understood (words in here) = accuracy of section is in doubt, words possibly guessed

5) A: I went (3) a lot further (.) than I intended. (.) = noticeable pause of 1 second or less (3) = pause approximately 3 seconds Note: pause length correct to the nearest half second

6) A: Right so you [ B: I’m not sure Overlap between A and B

7) A: Anyway Brian= B: =Okay, okay No gap between end of one speaker’s utterance and start of another’s

8) A: Yeaahh I seeee Extension of sound, phonetic interpretation of extended words

9) A: I think .hh I need more time . before word or sound = audible breath

10) A: I think so (laughing). I really (inaudible) Italicized & in parentheses = action / description; or inaudible words