In the book, "Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives," Lillian Rubin (1985) looks at friendships as they develop during adulthood. Rubin interviewed 300 people from a variety of backgrounds, between the ages of 25 and 55. One of her main findings was that women base their friendships on intimacy, emotional support and nurturance, while the typical man builds friendships with other men who share interest in a common activity. The ways in which men and women develop friendships is quite different, for men and women have very different needs; a woman looks for someone to listen to her, while a man is only interested in a casual "hobby" friendship.".
While researching this subject, I noticed that there were not many connections to Lillian Rubin's theory and the discussion of men and women being just friends. In her book, "Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots," Nancy Chodorow looks at how from the day one engages with ones parents; one is involved in a never-ending cycle of heterosexuality. "It is almost a truism to state that consideration of the woman-man relationship "as a sexual relationship, a core family relationship, a strongly enforced ideological goal and expectation "brings us near the heart of the sociology of gender" "(Chodorow pg. 67). This quote brings to light the socialized concept of a heterosexual relationship and how it is naturally a sexual one, and there is no hint of friendship within this idea. There is a pattern that I am seeing with the literature that points to sexual attraction being the "big speed bump " in heterosexual friendships, because it is part of gender socialization. For example, in "The Challenge of Sexual Attraction within Heterosexuals and Cross-Sex Friendship," Panayotis Halatsis and Nicolas Christakis (2011), where they found that even though sex differences in friendship expectations have not been necessarily studied, females appear to hold higher expectations for same-sex friends than males do.
