Are Friends Similar?

Given the importance of empathy and identification in women friends' standards of commitment, we would expect certain similarities among best friends. Studies have shown friends to be similar along most dimensions, whether socioeconomic, value-oriented, or personal.^[33] Generally, they explain, people like people who are like them and thus choose similar friends when they can, This suggests that close women friends' emphasis on disclosure and empathy as standards of commitment encourages homogeneity between best friends, since it might be easier to understand and participate in the feelings of someone who seems like oneself.

How were closest friends similar? All were very similar in race, age, marital status, and life-cycle stage, less similar in household income and religion. All but one of the closest friendships were between women of the same race; fourteen were between women of the same marital status; all were between women. Seventeen of the twenty-one women were similar in age, within six years. Sixteen were at the same stage of childrearing (both friends with children who were either young, older, or grown). I did not inquire about friends' education, but accounts indicated rough similarity there too.

The strongest similarity between closest friends, after gender and race, was in work status. Eighteen of twenty-one women had closest friends who also either worked at jobs or at home. The full-time paid workers were most likely to have closest friends whose jobs took up the same percentage of their time. Eight of nine of their closest friends also worked full-time (the one exception was a sister-friend).

By contrast, only seven believed their friends' households were at about the same income level (although I suspect that most were noting fairly small income differences). Half had closest friends of the same religion. When we exclude the sister-friendships, however, only six of the seventeen remaining closest friendships were between women of the same religion, even though a majority of

the respondents mentioned that they regularly practiced their religion.

Social segregation is probably the ultimate explanation of the racial similarity among best friends. White women and women of color rarely even engage in acquaintances in the contexts in which close friendships grow. The one cross-race best friendship, between Rita and June, grew out of work in a community service program. Their joint project encouraged them to think and talk about racism and cultural differences, and their personal relationship developed in this sensitizing climate.

The other dimensions of similarity among women underline the importance of empathy and mutuality in their close friendships. Similarities in age, marital status, and childrearing stage suggest that women draw closest to others who are sharing central identity-defining experiences. Between single women and married women, childless women and those with children, a gulf separates their interests, priorities, and problems.

Several women spoke of abrupt and inevitable changes in friendships when they or their friends married. Sometimes the change was provoked by a husband who disapproved of continued friendships with single friends or who wanted his wife to alter the terms of an old friendship to ones more consonant with a new primary commitment. Usually, women located the problem between the friends themselves.

After you're married, you're more tied down. I didn't think of it that way at the time, but Chris sure did.

We were still friends, but they weren't able to tear around the way we were used to—didn't have the money or the time. They had an interest in the marriage and the house.

I think friendships change because you have different expectations about someone who is married. That you won't see them as much alone. I didn't want to depend on her as much.

They didn't call me as often once I got married. They were out looking for boyfriends, and we had less and less in common. They looked at me differently.

Another recalled the pain of adjusting to newly diverging needs in the friendship when her friend remarried:

I missed her, even though she was still here. It seemed that when she was in need, I was always there. But when I was in need. . .. She didn't want to lose the friendship, but we couldn't stop it. If I were to call her up and say, Let's do something, chances are she'd have plans. They had their own set of friends—couples. I'd understand that, but I got my feelings kind of hurt at times.

Most of the friends who occupied different marital statuses met when their marital status was similar. Single and divorced women, most of whom worked, also often socialized during times married women identified as couple time or family time. Meeting now, single and married women would experience asymmetries like the impediments to mutuality just described. A husband's relationship to his wife's single friend would become a factor in the successful continuation of a friendship; at most, it might mean that socializing time is completely usurped.

Similar differences separated new mothers from their more foot-loose childless friends. Arlene described the decline of a college friendship that had held despite differences in marital status but dissolved when Arlene's first child was born: "There had always been a real chasm in our experiences, but we really clicked intellectually. When Tim was horn, the chasm expanded. I was going through something she just could not comprehend. And I was so involved with him, I didn't have the room left in my life for her."

Arlene, and others, allowed close friendships to fade as they drew closer to friends who also had children. Other pairs of friends seemed to anticipate the problem. Whether or not they did so consciously, several avoided the strain by synchronizing their childbearing. More than a few respondents echoed Nancy's response to a question about how close friendships fared once her first child was born. "All three of us were first pregnant together. We went along together from school to marriage to first babies. We still got together just as much, only now we had our kids."

Preschool, school-age, and teenage children each present a world of issues and problems to their primary caretakers. It is not surprising then to hear the mother of a teenage girl or the mother of several boys exclaim over the special camaraderie of a close friend whose parallel experience helped her interpret a very important one of her own. "It's so reassuring to commiserate on what

it's like to have teenage daughters screaming about what horrible mothers we are." Another, more restrained comment: "We both live in an all-male household. She knows that having boys in the house is not always bliss."

Similarities in employment seem to aim at symmetry of time available for friendship, which symbolically represents an equality of need. I interviewed only a few permanently full-time housewives. They preferred to visit friends during the day, when husbands were at work. Nonemployed women were likely to constitute their pool of potential friends, because employed women posed scheduling difficulties that were onerous to accommodate. Nancy, for example, who does very part-time work at home, was adjusting to her close friend Annette's return to a full-time job. "Annie just called me this morning while her boss was out. I'd been waiting to hear about her weekend. She didn't even get to finish the story. I miss our leisurely coffees." When asked what she wished was different about her friendships, Nancy said wistfully: "I guess everyone wishes to see more of her close friends than is necessary. I just wish we had more time to laugh together." Nancy's children were increasingly independent; and most of her friends who had stayed home with young children had returned to jobs. "It's difficult to meet friends. I think most of my friends work now. Those I'd like to be with or get acquainted with, they don't really have the time. It seems to be more difficult to meet people."

Housewives want friends who are available when they themselves are most available. Women who have jobs outside the home, raise children, and keep house—the universal triple role of employed mothers—need friends who are prepared to compromise with their severe time constraints. Women who labor under the same pressures are most likely to be amenable to the compromises working a double day exacts. Few of the employed women spoke directly of this motive. Thea is one who did. "Even at the time I met Catherine, she had zero time for anything outside her family. . .. Both of us are so busy, and so intense and driven. It's really nice to have someone who understands that in me. We can relax together with that."

As Thea found disappointing but familiar, Catherine's demanding professional schedule interfered with her friendship commitments many times.

She has a tendency to do what I also do—to promise to do things that, in fact, she's too busy to do.

I'll feel, "Sure, she's doing it again." And then I realize that I often have to do the same kind of thing. I just remind myself that I shouldn't depend too heavily on Catherine for some things.

Other employed women are also likely to understand work problems, even if they perform different work. Because women are concentrated in very few kinds of work, they are especially likely to grasp others' work predicaments. All seventeen of the employed women said they would discuss work problems with their friends. All but three regularly talked with friends about work. Another reason employed women have employed friends may be that friends lead one another into the workforce. At a time when more women are financially compelled to hold jobs and when more women wish to find them,^[34] the path from housewife to employed worker may be cleared by an exemplary friend.

Popular literature portrays a mutual resentment between full-time housewives and employed mothers. My interviews picked up only faint echoes of this resentment, which is purportedly rooted in conflicting values. The most apparent explanation for the strains I detected, however, is the difficulty of achieving mutuality and symmetry of exchange when different kinds of work generate different sets of needs. Mutuality and symmetry are important standards of commitment among best friends. In relationships less intense than best friendships, even those within the close network, there was less similarity in work status. I believe this is, in part, because the standards of mutuality are more relaxed here.

Sociological analyses of similarities in friendship have argued that structural constraints like poverty and lack of physical mobility limit people's ability to achieve desirable homogeneous relationships.^[35] The constraints that employed mothers' triple role put on their time, however, do not appear to decrease their chance of finding friends in similar situations; employed women probably have a balancing advantage in broader spheres for recruiting friends. Finding friends with compatible time constraints, and the issue of equality this represents, may be important enough that, although their jobs limit the time women spend with friends, women still strive to find friends with the qualities they consider important.

Best friends met only occasionally in voluntary organizations. As mothers of youngsters, most of the women I interviewed had little time for organized activity. And although some socialized with other women and couples they met at church, in children's recreation, or in the few voluntary organizations that they belonged to, they did not often do so. Several friends had joined each other in independent hobbies; several shopped together. But the women themselves attached little importance to this camaraderie. Best friendship centers on intimate talk; the women often cited joint activity as a vehicle for "just sitting and talking." They believed coparticipation in sports and clubs was much more integral to husbands' friendships than to their own, as studies of men's friendships confirm.^[36]

Pairs of women friends are very similar. The demographic results here parallel other friendship studies. Yet if these women correctly assessed friends' household income—and because women are consumers, they are excellent readers of economic indicators—they may be less similar in this respect than men friends are.^[37] Best friends may also have a lower rate of religious similarity than friends in general. As women's comments here showed, only some differences in beliefs and values inhibited their friendship; others they effectively ignored.

If indeed women friends are more similar in working hours and life cycle than in economic status and religion, this similarity may correspond to standards of commitment that very strongly emphasize psychological identification and empathy. Women best friends —more than women friends in general or men best friends—may select each other because of similar characteristics, such as marital status, that powerfully shape the experiences of personal life that women best friends talk about. Other similarities that figure less prominently in intimate disclosure may be less important.