Autonomy in Friendship

The ideal of autonomy poses friendship as an independent and private relationship—independent even of marriage. It suggests why

individuals rarely choose best friends from contexts, like work or church groups, that they do not enter or leave easily or often (see the last chapter). And it explains why they regularly choose best friends from contexts separate from marriage. Among the women I interviewed, only one had a closest friend whom she met through her husband (hers was the most distant of the close friendships described). All of the others drew closest to women they knew independently of their husbands.

I have already noted how responsibility for young children limits autonomous choice in friendships. For example, the mothers of young children chose friends whose childrearing practices were consonant with their own, to ensure a peaceful ground for sociability that necessarily included children. Poverty, long work hours, educational disadvantage, old age, and disability are also likely to limit choice in friendship.^[12] So, of course, are individual differences in needs and capacities for forming friendship; they may, in part, be gender-related.

I saw all of these constraints operate in my interviews. Poverty, for example, narrows the contexts from which one can choose friends as well as the resources one can exchange in friendship. Of the four women in my sample whose sisters remained their best friends, three had the lowest incomes and educations. There is more in their stories than disadvantage, however, to explain their choices. All three came from ethnic cultures that emphasized ideals of family solidarity; they also came from families with many daughters, so each chose among several potential sister-best friends. All three lived in family networks and economic circumstances that limited the "flowering out of rules of relevance" in their other relationships.^[13] That is, their values and poverty discouraged them from turning social contacts into friendships involving variegated exchanges of personal and material resources.

Whatever their circumstances, virtually all the women chose best friends independently of their husbands. Note, in the above examples, that family of origin—not marriage—appeared to narrow the choice of friends. Indeed, all three women with sister-best friends significantly defied husbands to help kin or accept support by kin. Like others in the sample, they perceived their best friendships as autonomous.

Best friendships emphasize autonomy from marriage more than

other friendships, even those in the close network. Thus, I expected that more "second circle" close friends and more sociable friends would have been acquainted through husbands. That is precisely the case with the women I interviewed. Moreover, couples often carry on friendships that are more sociable than intimate. Their relative power may easily influence how they recruit friends and socialize. Unless we assume that couples are of one mind and inclination, we must assume that one member's preference will prevail. And since husbands tend to have more marital power, I would expect more couples to be inducted by husbands than through wives. This was true in my sample, although the differences were not large. According to the wives, husbands periodically exercised a veto power over wives' choices of sociable couples. In many cases, this power seemed to leave the husbands happy to delegate the arrangement of the couples' social lives to the wives. Other, larger scale studies suggest the same: husbands recruit more couples as friends, and wives coordinate contacts within kin and couples.^[14]

A second indication of the ideal of autonomy appears in women's descriptions of their husbands' attitudes toward their women friends. All the women believed their husbands "approve of" their closest friendships. All but one believed their husbands "like" their closest friend (the exception said her husband "doesn't feel either way"). Contradicting these forced-choice responses, however, spontaneous comments occasionally revealed more than a few instances of husbands' hostility toward closest friends.

He'll ask, "Who'd she go to bed with last night?" But he won't discourage the friendship.

He's made little remarks about me and Jan, like "You guys are so close, you must be lesbians or something." He says it jokingly, but. . . Now I tell him, if he's worried about that, it's his problem.

Women may have emphasized their husbands' positive attitudes toward best friends because there is a norm of benignity toward a spouse's close same-sex friends. Its rationale is the liberty to choose one's friends. This interpretation is supported by responses to questions about whether husbands had "ever disapproved" of a friendship and whether they had "ever discouraged" one. Thirteen of twenty women said husbands (or former husbands) had at some

time disapproved of a friendship. But only six of these thirteen believed their husbands had actually discouraged the relationship.

He would never say, "Don't see her." It was more an intellectual put-down. Her ideas weren't sound, the feelings she had were laughable, or whatever.

He never tried to discourage it. But we'd talk about her and he'd tell me he just couldn't see how I could have anything in common with her. But he never tried to stop me.

He wouldn't have much to say when she was around; or he just wouldn't be there [be engaged]; or he'd try to set it up so he could disappear. But he'd never tell me I couldn't do things with her.

As the foregoing quotations hint, in most cases where apparent disapproval or outright discouragement had overridden the norm of benignity, the husband believed the friend to be morally suspect, a bad influence, or in some manner threatening to him or the marriage. This was Louise's conclusion when she recounted her husband's remark that she and her best friend must be lesbians. "I guess he feels threatened—because we are so close. Sometimes he feels I like her better than him. It's like what happened when I first went to work. He felt I wouldn't need him."

The friends who aroused disapproval were frequently single, divorced, or bad housekeepers. Dwight, Janine's husband, put a stop to her socializing with single girlfriends. "He thought I'd be messing—doing the same things they do. He figures they're single, and I'm married, and I shouldn't be around them." Betty's husband forbade her to associate with a woman in the neighborhood who was rumored to be "wild and irresponsible." Nancy's husband, Mike, and Kay's husband, George, were hostile to those of their wives' friends who neglected their housekeeping and paid too little attention to family. Nancy described Vi: "She was more interested in her clothes, herself, and her work. But I still liked her. Mike couldn't understand how we could be friends." Kay conceded that Trish was "disorganized," but she liked her for her "basic goodness." However,

George doesn't even want me to take the kids over there, because her house is such a mess. He gets disgusted because he thinks it would be easy for her to get things more together. He doesn't want to do much

with Trish and Jim. He gets all tensed up around them, and I get nervous and talk too much, trying to cover up what's happening. But I wouldn't say he discourages the friendship.

Frances first attributed Jack's hostility to her divorced friend, April, to a "bit of jealousy." Then she amended it: "Not jealousy, maybe a fear: 'I hope she doesn't decide to pick up April's bad habits.' She is loose, but she loves her kids. She's really O.K." Hilda's former husband had jealously crushed one friendship after another, insisting each was breaking up the marriage. She recalled his statements: "He never said why. But they could never come back."

Had the women found their husbands' disapproval discouraging to the relationship? The fact that most of the disapproved friendships are now defunct suggests that they had. Yet the women described the decline of their friendships as motivated by their own disenchantment. "I ended up feeling the way he did about her."

Because most of these women were not hesitant to admit elsewhere that they had complied with their husbands' demands against their own desires, it was not egalitarian marital ideology that caused them to deny their husbands' negative influence on friendships. Rather, I suspect, they wished to see their practices consistent with their belief that close friendships are a very individual matter and should begin and end independently. As we shall see, women expected friendships to respect marriage as a highest priority. But the friendships themselves were to be personal.

Friendships were also to be private. The protection of confidences was a clearly specified friendship norm and the foundation of mutual trust. All but two of the married women named friends as those "to whom you've told things you've never told anyone else." I initially concluded this meant a friend's confidences were secret, even from one's spouse. Yet when I asked a hypothetical question about confidentiality to gauge how each woman actually constructed the boundaries between friendship and marriage, some answers were conditional. I asked, If your best friend asked you to keep secret something you really wanted to share with your husband, how would you deal with that? Two-thirds answered firmly, "I'd keep the secret." The remaining third answered conditionally:

I probably would keep it secret. If it were really personal, like something about her marriage, I wouldn't tell. Some other things I might tell.

If I thought I had to tell him, I'd tell her then. Most things, fine, I wouldn't tell.

If she really didn't want anyone to know—if it would hurt her in any way, I wouldn't tell him. Some things I think she wouldn't mind. And I know it wouldn't go further.

For these women, breaking a friend's trust to share a confidence with one's husband was conceivable, although hardly routine. Comments like this suggest that most women regard close friendship as an autonomous relationship with its own firm rules of closure.