Why do difficult friendships persist? Justifying the 'good enough' friend


Laura Eramian, Dalhousie University; Peter Mallory, St. Francis Xavier University

Scholars have shown how therapeutic culture gives rise to a series of idioms that encourage people to reflect on, monitor, break-off, or even ‘curate’ their personal relationships in the service of optimal ‘wellbeing’ (Eramian, Mallory, and Herbert 2023). Popular media brims with content about discerning ‘healthy’ from ‘toxic’ relationships, including friendship (Lahad and van Hooff 2022) or the necessity of extricating oneself from ‘emotionally draining’ or ‘one-sided’ friendships. Alongside these therapeutic cultural imperatives, however, exist the intricacies and commitments of everyday friendships as lived and practiced. Despite the messages from various commentators and experts on relationships and wellbeing, imperfect friendship is a common, relatable experience that people easily recognize. How then might we make sense of the intersections of ubiquitous therapeutic directives to cut out friends who can disappoint, and the commonplace experience of maintaining less-than-ideal or difficult yet ongoing friendships? In this paper we draw on interviews from a series of recent interview and participant-observation-based studies we have conducted on modern friendship in an Atlantic Canadian city. These studies produced rich data on difficult yet ongoing friendships and the reasons that people saw them persisting in spite of their imperfections. Those reasons and justifications include the following: people may not like what it says about them if they break off the friendship, stubbornness and hard work, long histories together, inertia, people ‘settle’ for the friends they have because they have no time to make new ones, and some people even saw difficult friendships as valuable because they can make them better persons. To analyze our findings, we take an interpretive (Geetz 1973) and cultural sociological (Illouz 2008; Swidler 2001) approach to friendship that begins from the idea that it has the inherent, unpredictable potential to oscillate from feeling easy and pleasurable to difficult and fraught. We argue that the justifications our research participants offered for how and why their difficult friendships persist raise a series of competing moral imperatives that people struggle to navigate, some of which align with the therapeutic directives to prioritize the self and wellbeing, while some awkwardly conflict with the therapeutic.

This paper will be presented at the following session: