CAHSS Faculty Articles

Title

The Meaning of Friendship

Department

Department of History and Political Science

Publication Date

12-21-2010

Publication Title

Metapsychology Online Reviews

ISSN

1931-5716

Volume

14

Issue/No.

51

Abstract

Excerpt

Friendship is a concept that everyone thinks about and is a practice that everyone is involved with one way or another. But, like love, for example, the concept (and its associated practice) is notoriously difficult to define and explain. When people involved in a relationship have differing expectations, because they have differing understandings of the concept of friendship, bad things can happen. Thus, the need for some clarity regarding the meaning of friendship. Vernon acknowledges the difficulty of defining friendship when he says, “it seems that it is not possible to say unequivocally what friendship is” (7). He attributes this difficulty to the diverse application and ambiguity of the concept. So Vernon aims, as he says, “not to try to produce a comprehensive definition or theory of friendship. Rather, the value of asking about friendship lies in the asking, not necessarily in coming to any incontestable conclusions” (9).

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