Lillian B. Rubin — noted social scientist, writer and psychotherapist — has written movingly on love relationships between men and women (Intimate Strangers), and on working-class family life (Worlds of Pain). Now, in this major work drawing on years of study and based on interviews with three hundred men and women from diverse backgrounds and circumstances, she turns her attention to that most valued yet fragile bond: friendship — friendships between women, women and men, couples, even between best friends. In chapters covering this full range of friendships and their interrelations with kinship, marriage, and romance, Dr. Rubin exposes the ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions with which friendship in our society is hedged. Unlike other relationships, friendship for us is a private affair. We have no rituals, no social contracts, no shared tasks, no role requirements, no institutional supports of any kind to bind and hold friends together.

ISBN: 0060154608