Friendships in the "Western world"- Part 2- Cultural barriers facing friendships

The main cultural barriers facing friendships

There are various cultural barriers in the modern Western world that encourage people to pursue short-term acquaintances rather than long-term close friends, and to restrict close friendships to people who are related to within a few generations ("family"), thus restricting the range of people that we can potentially be close friends with.  I sense that these issues are stronger in the USA than here in the UK, but the same issues crop up to some extent in most "Western" type cultures.

Here is a list of some of the specific issues.

Many people subconsciously perceive bonds between friends to be disposable unless they are considered "family", i.e. related to within a few generations.

If I form close bonds with a branch of extended family, they will always be seen as my "family" because of the recognised blood ties, so if I move to a different part of the country, I do not face a social expectation to leave them behind.  But if I form similarly close bonds with a group of friends from Institution A, and then move over to Institution B, many people perceive those bonds to no longer be relevant to the present, because we no longer go to an institution together and we aren't considered "family".  Thus, a social expectation develops on me to leave those friends in the past and "move on".

The perception that "friendships are disposable but families are forever" is self-reinforcing.

The more widespread this perception is, the harder it is to find reliable, trustworthy friends outside of one's recognised "family" because there is a greater risk of them deciding, after a while, "You're not in my family so you're disposable", a problem that does not affect "family" relationships because, as the saying goes, "family is forever".  So, in cultures where this double standard is the norm, people learn through experience that you can trust "family" more than "friends".

Marriages and children tend to bring families together and prise friends apart.

One reason for this is the cultural perception that couples and children need to spend "family time" together, where they are expected to include people who are related to within a few generations, and exclude people who are not.

Another is the fact that when people have to juggle jobs, raising children and keeping their spouses happy, they generally have less time to spend on other relationships.  Since some relationships have to be sacrificed as a result of this, and it is relatively socially unacceptable to dispose of people who are related to within a few generations, because "they're your family so you can't just drop them", close friends are at risk of being dropped because they are not considered "family".

Close friendships, especially those involving men, are at risk of being stigmatised due to fear that they might become sexual.

While close friendships are typically of a "platonic" spiritual, affectionate, non-sexual nature, they are capable of generating a limited amount of unconscious intimate/physical attraction, which due to human hormones, can occasionally trigger involuntary sexual arousal.  This happens in most close relationships, including "family" ones, and is usually harmless and does not imply that the relationship is likely to turn sexual.

But in the Victorian era, tied in with a rampant paranoia over homosexuality, a myth evolved that the above issue was abnormal and implied a desire for sex, so men became afraid to become close to male friends for fear that if it triggered any involuntary sexual arousal, it probably meant that they were homosexual.  Shows of affection between male friends also became stigmatised as a sign of homosexuality because of the way that affection is seen as "sensitive" and inconsistent with the male gender role.  While this problem has declined in same-sex friendships since the 1950s due to the growing acceptance of homosexuality, sexual anxiety remains as strong as ever, highlighted by the fact that men's friendships with children are currently similarly stigmatised due to the modern-day paranoia over child sexual abuse.  

In societies where the genders are heavily segregated, male-female friendships typically suffer from the same problem, due to a perception that no "real" man would value a woman as a friend unless he secretly wanted to have sex with her, and the fear of adultery.  This problem has not completely gone away in the UK but, due to the dwindling enforcement of traditional gender roles, is far less than it was in the 1950s, and so male-female friendships are relatively common nowadays.  However, I do fear that if the media was to generate paranoia over male-on-female sexual abuse then male-female friendships would end up stigmatised again.

These problems typically exempt "family" because of a popular myth that taboos on incest make erotic desire impossible between known relatives.  As the unintended elements of erotic desire are primarily down to human hormones, this simply doesn't follow, while deliberate erotic desire, of the sort that can lead to sex abuse, can and does happen between parents/children and siblings.  But the myth has persisted for centuries in various cultures purely because not enough people question it.

Traditional gender roles are limiting

Traditionally, modern-day Western friendships between men involve only limited emotional bonding, due to anxiety over the possibility of the friendship turning sexual, so it can be hard for men to find male friends who will provide them with much emotional fulfilment.  Meanwhile, due to the perception that various hobbies and competitive activities are "unfeminine" and something that females "grow out of", women can find it hard to find female friends who will be interested in sharing those sort of interests.  As a result, men's friendships are limited emotionally and women's are limited socially.

This is partly why some find male-female friendships very rewarding, as people can feel more comfortable behaving inconsistently with their gender roles with opposite-sex friends than with same-sex friends.  However, this can result in their friendships being regarded with suspicion by bystanders.  This problem is declining as enforcement of traditional sex roles continues to decline, but there is still a fair way to go, and we need to keep making progress.

Solutions

As well as the solution that I identified in part 1 (respecting relationships according to how close/dependent they are, rather than blood/partnership ties to within a few generations) we need to clear up a few of these myths about sexual arousal in non-sexual relationships, as they generate unnecessary fears over the possibility of a non-sexual friendship turning sexual, which is a particularly big problem for men's friendships.  And, friendships will also be helped significantly by a continued reduction in segregation into traditional sex roles.