Intimate friendship is a modern relationship. If we think of intimacy as the sharing of one's inner life or mutual self-exploration – not simply familiarity and interdependence – we can observe the flowering of intimate friendship in the past few centuries. The assertion that intimate friendship is modern contradicts the prevailing view that modernity drained intimacy and trust from the vibrant community of past times (Nisbet, 1953; criticised by Fischer, et al., 1977). The conventional wisdom holds that, as marriage modernised and husbands and wives became romantic lovers and best friends, friendship faded in social importance. To the contrary, I will argue, intimate friendship and intimate marriage developed as intertwined cultural ideals and patterns amidst a widening culture of individualism.

In recent decades, social historians have unearthed and interpreted the history of sentiment (Cott, 1977; Stone, 1977; Smith-Rosenberg, 1979; Lystra, 1989). I use their work here to assemble an account of the modernisation of friendship, focusing on the exchange of intimacy. My account of modern friendship will centre on the articulation of a burgeoning culture of individualism with changes in social institutions.

The articulation of cultural change and social institutions

Wuthnow (1989) uses the term ‘articulation’ to refer to specific linkages in the ‘fit’ between cultural patterns and their social structural contexts. Cultural innovations that spread, Wuthnow maintains, are able to draw resources from their institutional contexts and then transcend them. Resources – like money, role flexibility, or events that provide useful symbols – enable a culture to spread and become routinised. Wuthnow shows how the creation, selection, and institutionalisation of cultural changes draw on resources in the social environment of cultural actors.