Some years ago, Palgrave Macmillan contacted me to commission a book on adulthood. Since I had just finished my first book on that concept and the experiences it seeks to capture, I was asked to reflect on other possibilities.[i] Likely because I owe my life trajectory to a considerable extent to my friends, but also, and more directly, because my former teacher Maria Markus had written a thought-provoking paper, friendship came to mind.[ii] When I began my research journey, however, I very quickly realised what a puzzle I had set myself. Expecting to make a modest contribution to an enormous sociological corpus of work, I was actually faced with the task of making sense of disparate perspectives and little agreement across disciplines in order to cobble together a sensitising description of the relationship.

 Soon it became clear to me that while friendship matters to people, it plays a marginal role in the social sciences. Although lauded for its contributions to wellbeing, the intimacies of friendship are unlikely to quicken the pulse of researchers in troubled times, when the transformations of economy, polity and ecology require concerted attention.[iii] In my first book on friendship I constructed a sensitising definition as a lens through which to view gender relations.[iv] The persistence of the question whether women and men can be ‘just friends’ points to a potent heteronormative scheme that enjoins cross-gender friends to justify their friendship as well as undertake ‘boundary work’ to keep at bay the spectre of sexual attraction.[v] Viewed in this way, it is obvious that gendered power does its work not only in market and polity but in forms of everyday sociability. This is just one indication that it pays to take a more wholistic view of friendship, to reflect on its culturally and historically specific meanings and on the social conditions that enable or hinder its formation and maintenance.

Privacy, publicness, freedom

The central sociological characteristic of friendship is its weak connection to the social system, its institutional deficit. Neither formalised in law nor a 24/7 relationship anchored by family, mortgages and common life plans, friendship is self-produced and sustained. Its cultural protocols are not as prescriptive as those regarding ‘true love’ and marriage. This, in turn, accounts for much of the freedom friendship offers us to create highly idiosyncratic small worlds. But it also accounts for the absence of therapeutic services should things go wrong, something that is especially interesting because friendship endings tend to be ambiguous. Friends commonly don’t break up; they drift apart. Ghosting is especially common. In more than one sense, then, friendship is a secondary relationship in the hierarchy of intimate priorities.

The freedom to make and maintain each friendship in its own image does not thrive in a vacuum. Privacy matters. This is thrown into stark relief when turning to personal relationships under totalitarianism. During Stalin’s reign, privacy, whether spatial or informational, was all but annihilated – and with it a necessary condition for friendship.[vi] Privacy makes possible the extension of trust based on the preparedness to open ourselves to others, to be vulnerable. When the wrong word could be fatal, trusting was extraordinarily risky. An important historical limit case, it can alert us to emerging, if less dramatic, vulnerabilities.

 Digital vulnerabilities

The digital revolution with its demand for visibility has amplified feelings of vulnerability. We might ask what happens to the conditions for friendship when people are aware that their private social media interactions are never really private at all because parasitic corporate thirds mediate, harvest and monetise them? What happens when you entrust your personal information to someone who can use it to whatever end? It’s under such conditions that privacy and publicness become inextricably intertwined – and defensive strategies emerge. Disclosure becomes more selective, algospeak circumvents social media moderation, the line between performativity and authenticity is blurred. There is at least the possibility, then, that trust becomes an ever more precious good – so precious perhaps that friendship may not be worth the risk.

Enter the loneliness pandemic, which arrived promptly at a time when we denizens of the Global North are more connected than ever. If we ever needed evidence that loneliness is most acutely felt in a crowd, digital sociality clearly shows that numbers of friends, like numbers of likes, cannot indicate depth of connection. I wonder whether that pandemic isn’t to a significant extent driven by a sense of digitally amplified vulnerability. For, when privacy and intimacy are compromised, so is the soil in which friendship grows. No such risks need be contemplated when engaging with your average AI companion who, as an added bonus, learns very quickly what you want to hear. Although research suggests that young users of AI companions prefer ‘real friends’, remember that this is only the beginning of runaway developments.[vii]

Friendship as barometer of freedom

I have said that little is at stake in friendship. Its societal contribution is unclear, its status amongst relationships is secondary. So, what’s the issue? Here is how I see it. Friendship belongs to the range of things we do for their own sake. Like all the things we do with no particular end in mind, friendship exists not just because of the world, but despite it. This is precisely what the United Nations’ International Day of Friendship (30 Jul) recognises:

“In a time when the noise of division grows louder — fueled by wars, conflicts, inequality, and fear — friendship feels almost radical in its simplicity. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare or policy; it doesn’t need speeches or signatures. It begins with something quieter: a conversation, a shared moment, a willingness to see one another not as strangers but as fellow travelers through the human experience.” 

On that view, friendship emerges not only as subtly subversive, but as a barometer of the conditions required for building trusting relationships that resist being hitched to instrumental ends. There is a subtle anarchy to these small worlds that turn for their own sake, that turn just so. This, amongst other things, is why friendship matters, and why it deserves more attentions from social scientists.

[i] Blatterer H (2009) Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781845452858. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/blatterercoming

[ii] Markus MR (2010) “Lovers and Friends: ‘Radical Utopias’ of Intimacy?” Thesis Eleven 101(1): 6–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513609360606. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0725513609360606

[iii] Waldinger R and Schulz M (2023) The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. New York: Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Good-Life/Robert-Waldinger/9781982166700

[iv] Blatterer H (2015) Everyday Friendships: Intimacy as Freedom in a Complex World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137316400

[v] Linek L (2021) “Forgetting Gender while Desexualising Friendship? Heteronormativity and Everyday Practices of Cross-Gender Friendship among Adults in Germany.” In: Wahlström Henriksson H and Goedecke K (eds.) Close Relations: Family, Kinship and Beyond. Singapore: Springer, pp. 53–68. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0792-9_4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-16-0792-9_4

[vi] Read more in Figes O (2007) The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. London: Allen Lane. https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-whisperers-9780141808871; and Fitzpatrick S (1999) Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/everyday-stalinism-9780195050011?cc=au&lang=en&

[vii] Robb MB and Mann S (2025) Talk, trust, and trade-offs: How and why teens use AI companions. San Francisco: Common Sense Media.