A plea for the study of friendship

At Arcade, Gregory Jusdanis argues for the study of friendship:

So what’s wrong with friendship and why are people so indifferent to it? How can an important relationship be so lost in the academic radar screen? Of course, there has been in the last twenty years some work on friendship in many fields, such as literary criticism, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Interestingly, many of these studies begin with the standard complaint about the little interest expressed by the academy in the topic.

This professional unresponsiveness is matched by society’s coolness to friendship. In contrast to classical Greece and Rome or twelfth-century medieval Europe, modern society makes marriage its organizing metaphor. It is marriage that gets religious, political, and legal recognition. Friendship is really invisible, enjoying little institutional support. The community is not concerned if we make friends or not as much as it does if we get married. Friendship seems is crucial in childhood and adolescence as a socializing mechanism. But after the years of prime reproduction have passed, the community loses interest in our friendships. Ask a middle age man how many intimate friends he has! And then ask yourself if anyone cares.

His final two lines: "We want the two characters to conform to the reigning categories of heterosexual and homosexual. But we don’t want them to be friends because, as friends, they would disrupt these categories."