ABSTRACT

Viable friendships, like all significant relationships, are ongoing communicative achievements, requiring interactively developed expressive and interpretive practices. As a broad category of interpersonal relationship in American culture, however, friendships are distinctively underdetermined by publicly recognized normative features. In contrast to the legal or religious sanctions and prescriptions for marriage, the economic contracts and specifications for professional partnerships and organizational relations, and the certifiable blood ties and expectations of kinship, the duties and rights of friendship are privately negotiated and voluntarily enacted.