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Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives
An exploration of the role of friendship in men's and women's lives.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1900
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 12, 2024
“unlike a marriage, friendship in our society is secured by an emotional bond alone. with no social compact, no ritual moment, no pledge of loyalty and constancy to hold a friendship in place, it becomes not only the most neglected social relationship of our time but, all too often, our most fragile one as well.”
i didn’t know anything about this book going in other than it’s about friendship so of course i jumped to read it, but if i had known the author was a psychotherapist and uses psychoanalysis to explore friendship, i would’ve passed. i just don’t think we need to psychoanalyze and pathologize everything or that behaviors/feelings can be explained away simply by mutually exclusive binary gender categories and basically reduced to mommy/daddy issues. hard pass on that freudian shit. especially when it comes a heavy dose of binary gender roles, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and bioessentialism. there’s also the narrative that friendships exist to just fill the gaps of or pick up the slack from your other relationships and a whole lot of “men and women can’t have relationships that aren’t romantically or sexually charged or complicated in some way unless one of them is gay” propaganda.
despite that, there are some topics discussed that i appreciate, such as differences in male friendships and female friendships and their intensities and labels; the prioritization of family relationships over friendships, even when there isn’t really even a relationship or like with the family member; how people will stick it out with family relationships through hard and bad times but abandon a friendship experiencing the same issues; the lack of language for friendships: the start, the development, the end; historically friendships have not received attention in research; the expectation of prioritizing romantic relationships over platonic relationships, and the belief that all of our needs should be able to be met within said romantic relationship; couples vs single and how both sides feel neglected and abandoned by the other.
content/trigger warnings; amatonormativity, marriage, divorce, death, homophobia, f slur, racism, n word, misogyny, toxic masculinity, war, grief/loss, bioessentialism, cissexism,
i didn’t know anything about this book going in other than it’s about friendship so of course i jumped to read it, but if i had known the author was a psychotherapist and uses psychoanalysis to explore friendship, i would’ve passed. i just don’t think we need to psychoanalyze and pathologize everything or that behaviors/feelings can be explained away simply by mutually exclusive binary gender categories and basically reduced to mommy/daddy issues. hard pass on that freudian shit. especially when it comes a heavy dose of binary gender roles, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and bioessentialism. there’s also the narrative that friendships exist to just fill the gaps of or pick up the slack from your other relationships and a whole lot of “men and women can’t have relationships that aren’t romantically or sexually charged or complicated in some way unless one of them is gay” propaganda.
despite that, there are some topics discussed that i appreciate, such as differences in male friendships and female friendships and their intensities and labels; the prioritization of family relationships over friendships, even when there isn’t really even a relationship or like with the family member; how people will stick it out with family relationships through hard and bad times but abandon a friendship experiencing the same issues; the lack of language for friendships: the start, the development, the end; historically friendships have not received attention in research; the expectation of prioritizing romantic relationships over platonic relationships, and the belief that all of our needs should be able to be met within said romantic relationship; couples vs single and how both sides feel neglected and abandoned by the other.
content/trigger warnings; amatonormativity, marriage, divorce, death, homophobia, f slur, racism, n word, misogyny, toxic masculinity, war, grief/loss, bioessentialism, cissexism,
July 13, 2010
from page 13: This book is based on in-depth interviews, each lasting several hours, with 300 men and women, ages 25 to 55...
Just Friends has footnotes, an extensive bibliography and an index. Since it is a qualitative study, it is missing the quantitative charts and graphs.
When I see that a book was published in 1985 (like this one), my brain thinks "pretty recent" until I count 25 years on my fingers and toes. But in most ways this book is still applicable to today's world. (OK, the author does marvel at the phone being a way to keep in touch with friends-at-a-distance, predating the use of email and video connections.)
Lillian Rubin is a psychotherapist so it should not be surprising that the book leans heavily on psychoanalysis to explain human behavior. The author is right there with you as you read the book with a good deal of self-disclosure and verbatim recitations of conversations with people participating in the study.
I first ran into Lillian Rubin in Worlds of Pain, a text for a social work class over 20 years ago. Her righting style is relatively conversational (albeit, a fairly elevated conversation) only slipping into lecture mode on occasion to delve into her analysis. Rubin observes that since the initial primary caregiver is a mother in most cases, a different disassociation (separation, autonomy, identity) process is present for men and women.
The participation of feminism and gay awareness is throughout the book without being overdone. The author notes that gay and lesbian friendships will have to be handled in a separate book. However, some examples cited are about gay people. I note that Rubin has evidently not written that book about gay friendships in ensuing years. Consideration her frequency of self-examination, it is likely that she decided that a person with a homosexual experience would be in the best position to write that book.
The book is packed with declarations of fact with the support of many, many real life examples as you would expect in a text book. Footnotes abound. She ranges from the simple concepts to the complex. A fairly straight forward simple example is that woman experience shared intimacies while men experience shared activities. For me, an example of a complex issue was the results of a male with a mother figure and a female with a mother figure with the added human complexity of a homosexual figure.
As a non-fiction book, it is more demanding than the average novel. For some it may stimulate thinking, for others sleep. Every reader has some experience related to friendships, even if it is having no friends. I found that the book involved the reader especially if the reader accepted the psychoanalytical viewpoint.
Maybe the subtitle of the book, The Role of Friendship in Our Lives, says it all. This is a comprehensive look at friendship through the years and under a variety of circumstances. It is not a long book. It is one that you can read in a few days and then refer back to over the years. In spite of its age since publication of 25 years, this book is remarkably readable today. Of course, if I were a college student today, I might not think much of a book like this since it is older than me.
Just Friends has footnotes, an extensive bibliography and an index. Since it is a qualitative study, it is missing the quantitative charts and graphs.
When I see that a book was published in 1985 (like this one), my brain thinks "pretty recent" until I count 25 years on my fingers and toes. But in most ways this book is still applicable to today's world. (OK, the author does marvel at the phone being a way to keep in touch with friends-at-a-distance, predating the use of email and video connections.)
Lillian Rubin is a psychotherapist so it should not be surprising that the book leans heavily on psychoanalysis to explain human behavior. The author is right there with you as you read the book with a good deal of self-disclosure and verbatim recitations of conversations with people participating in the study.
I first ran into Lillian Rubin in Worlds of Pain, a text for a social work class over 20 years ago. Her righting style is relatively conversational (albeit, a fairly elevated conversation) only slipping into lecture mode on occasion to delve into her analysis. Rubin observes that since the initial primary caregiver is a mother in most cases, a different disassociation (separation, autonomy, identity) process is present for men and women.
The participation of feminism and gay awareness is throughout the book without being overdone. The author notes that gay and lesbian friendships will have to be handled in a separate book. However, some examples cited are about gay people. I note that Rubin has evidently not written that book about gay friendships in ensuing years. Consideration her frequency of self-examination, it is likely that she decided that a person with a homosexual experience would be in the best position to write that book.
The book is packed with declarations of fact with the support of many, many real life examples as you would expect in a text book. Footnotes abound. She ranges from the simple concepts to the complex. A fairly straight forward simple example is that woman experience shared intimacies while men experience shared activities. For me, an example of a complex issue was the results of a male with a mother figure and a female with a mother figure with the added human complexity of a homosexual figure.
As a non-fiction book, it is more demanding than the average novel. For some it may stimulate thinking, for others sleep. Every reader has some experience related to friendships, even if it is having no friends. I found that the book involved the reader especially if the reader accepted the psychoanalytical viewpoint.
Maybe the subtitle of the book, The Role of Friendship in Our Lives, says it all. This is a comprehensive look at friendship through the years and under a variety of circumstances. It is not a long book. It is one that you can read in a few days and then refer back to over the years. In spite of its age since publication of 25 years, this book is remarkably readable today. Of course, if I were a college student today, I might not think much of a book like this since it is older than me.
January 20, 2008
I really enjoyed this book. Rubin's research brings her to some interesting insights about our culture's ambivalence toward friendship, despite the significant roles friends play in our lives. Why is friendship "the neglected relationship"? How do the quantity and quality of friendships typically change over time? Are there differences in the friendship styles and expectations of men and women? How do friendships become interwoven into the language and fabric of kin relationships? Rubin considers these and other fascinating questions about what it means to be friends.
October 12, 2020
Rounded up from a 2.5. This book has some brilliant insights and makes important arguments. However, it generalized constantly. All women are stereotyped as one form of woman, and the same with men. While I grasp that there are trends with both, the book was very inflexible about the spectrum of different personalities and development for women and men, which I believe took away from the authors points. If she would have been more clear that she was noting significant trends, instead of using language that presented her theories as absolute, I would probably be giving this book 3.5 or 4 stars.
September 3, 2022
This healed a part of my friendship-related trauma and made me feel seen.
November 17, 2012
I've had this book for at least 8 years, and finally read it this morning. Altho almost 30 years old now, what she says still resonates.
Ultimiately, friends are important because they make navigating life easier. They reflect back who we want to be and allow us to be several different selves. She rejects the notion of one true self in favor of several parts of the self that are always in the process of becoming (p 44) in ways that kin and family do not. Thus, our friendships affirm who we are. Rubin also explores things that can change friendships - largely coupling and uncoupling, but also different life stages - and opposite-gendered friendships.
This male-female friendship aspect is the most interesting to me, having always had some level of a male friend in my life. Rubin argues that we're looking in our friends for a piece of ourselves to be reflected back to us, and our opposite gendered friends reflect back a piece of us our same-gendered friends cannot. Thus, they fulfill a different need. However, the sexual must often be confronted and rejected before such a friendship can confidently emerge. This type of friendship she finds to be more common in people who are married later in life and thus have an opportunity to meet and dismiss more people as potential mates but retain them as friends. Also, they are less likely to be seen as acceptable among those who marry young and only ever experience the opposite sex in the role of 'spouse.'
She ends in defining how best friends are those who cross the line from "secular" to "sacred" and become family, complete with obligations and joy. These friendships withstand the test of time, but more importantly are able to adapt to life changes and accept new realities as they emerge, rather than hanging onto an illusion of what once was, largely because they are based on a shared set of values more than anything else.
Ultimiately, friends are important because they make navigating life easier. They reflect back who we want to be and allow us to be several different selves. She rejects the notion of one true self in favor of several parts of the self that are always in the process of becoming (p 44) in ways that kin and family do not. Thus, our friendships affirm who we are. Rubin also explores things that can change friendships - largely coupling and uncoupling, but also different life stages - and opposite-gendered friendships.
This male-female friendship aspect is the most interesting to me, having always had some level of a male friend in my life. Rubin argues that we're looking in our friends for a piece of ourselves to be reflected back to us, and our opposite gendered friends reflect back a piece of us our same-gendered friends cannot. Thus, they fulfill a different need. However, the sexual must often be confronted and rejected before such a friendship can confidently emerge. This type of friendship she finds to be more common in people who are married later in life and thus have an opportunity to meet and dismiss more people as potential mates but retain them as friends. Also, they are less likely to be seen as acceptable among those who marry young and only ever experience the opposite sex in the role of 'spouse.'
She ends in defining how best friends are those who cross the line from "secular" to "sacred" and become family, complete with obligations and joy. These friendships withstand the test of time, but more importantly are able to adapt to life changes and accept new realities as they emerge, rather than hanging onto an illusion of what once was, largely because they are based on a shared set of values more than anything else.
October 9, 2008
This is a psychology book. I enjoyed this book and it helped me with what I was looking for.
February 20, 2025
I love friends!!!!!!!!!!! Friendship is the most precious thing we will ever experience and I love when that is backed up by scholars 💯💯💯
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