Friendship is characterized by ill-assorted, often opposing qualities and experiences: It is both pleasurable and fraught, both private and public, and a mode of both solidarity and exclusion. It is critically important to people, yet increasingly the subject of reflexive scrutiny, evaluation, and disappointment. With all the talk of a modern loneliness epidemic and the rapid rise of a friendship self-help industry in response to it, government officials, social workers, physicians, and therapists see in friendship a bond that can make us healthier, happier, more productive, and less lonely (Cohen Reference Cohen2024; Franco Reference Franco2022; Liming Reference Liming2023; Murthy Reference Murthy2020). And yet, studies show that North Americans are spending less time with friends. In 1986, nearly 48 percent reported seeing friends on an average day, while in 2022 just over 19 percent reported the same. Furthermore, 46.3 percent worried about how little time they spent with friends and family (Statistics Canada 2025). A 2023 survey in the United States found that 61 percent saw friendship as central to a fulfilling life compared to those who said the same about getting married (23 percent) or having children (26 percent) (Pew Research Center 2023). Friendship today is thus highly celebrated, yet also elusive and the subject of concern. What are we to make of these changing values, practices, and expectations of modern friendship?

The premise of this book is that friendship is fundamentally problematic, and our aim is to develop perspectives that move beyond more traditional approaches that either (a) celebrate friendship as an unassailably “good thing” that enhances human well-being and acts as a panacea for modern ills like loneliness and incivility or (b) deride its rising importance as a sign of declining public life or the overall quality of relationships. In the early social science scholarship on friendship in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers faced the challenge of showing why friendship matters in people’s lives, that it is not just a source of pleasurable diversion but also a key source of social solidarity. If scholarship on friendship was rare several decades ago, today we find important works across the humanities and social sciences, for example, in philosophy (Schwarzenbach Reference Schwarzenbach2009), social and political theory (Allen Reference Allen2004; Digeser Reference Digeser2016), anthropology (Bell & Coleman Reference Bell and Coleman1999; Desai & Killick; Reference Desai and Killick2010), sociology (Allan Reference Allan1989; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2018; Spencer & Pahl Reference Spencer and Pahl2006), and psychology (Hojjat & Moyer Reference Hojjat and Moyer2017). If the first task of early friendship scholarship was to justify attention to it and to show its often hidden importance, today our task is to develop a richer, less one-sided view, one that can address not only the promise of friendship but also its potential perils. This book is part of advancing a new collective research agenda, one that aims to develop a richer, more critical account of friendship that addresses not only its “goods” but also its more ambivalent dimensions, and why it matters that we understand them. The contributors gathered at a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-supported workshop at Dalhousie University in May 2025 to collaborate on the volume, share feedback on chapter drafts, and consolidate our collective research agenda.

Calls to approach friendship critically are not new. Indeed, this book is inspired by Heaphy and Davies’s (Reference Heaphy and Davies2012) article, “Critical friendships,” that takes account of its difficulties, not just its pleasures or rewards. Likewise, the most influential scholars on why friendship matters never believed friendships are only ever positive, even while they often downplayed or overlooked the troublesome sides. Allan (Reference Allan1989) notes that actual friendships rarely live up to their pristine ideals. Spencer and Pahl (Reference Spencer and Pahl2006) write that they focus only on friendships that are “important” to people, which for them means leaving aside what they call “the dark side of friendship,” even while they note that “this is undoubtably an important theme” (2). In other words, even while friendship’s “dark side” has been recognized, the overwhelming approach to friendship has been celebratory, stressing its positive, defining qualities of equality, freedom, and choice (Davies Reference Davies, May and Nordqvist2019). Friendship has been the screen upon which scholars have projected all that can be good in human bonds, often as a way of critiquing what they perceive as the limits and deficiencies of other relationships, communities, and institutions. Against the hierarchical, obligatory, instrumental, or impersonal qualities of economic exchange, work relations, kinship ties, or bonds of love and marriage, friendship has served as a modern counter-ideal, a “pure relationship” where people can – in principle – voluntarily orient to each other as equals in a relation they value for its own sake (Giddens Reference Giddens1992; Mallory & Eramian Reference Mallory, Eramian, Alexander and Horgan2025; Miller Reference Miller2017). As Heaphy and Davies (Reference Heaphy and Davies2012) succinctly put it, scholars tend to treat “idealised friendships as the answer to the problematic realities of other relational forms” (312).

Given these overwhelmingly positive accounts of friendship, a core group of scholars has been stressing the need for a critical approach since the early 2010s, one that can address not only the “goods” of friendship but also its connection to loss, disappointment, crises of self-worth, and relations of power and inequality. Alongside Heaphy and Davies’s (Reference Heaphy and Davies2012) “Critical friendships” article, Smart et al. (Reference Smart, Davies, Heaphy and Mason2012) analyzed how difficult or broken friendships may produce “ontological insecurity,” as people question their very sense of self when faced with discomfort in friendship (see also Eramian & Mallory Reference Eramian and Mallory2021). More recently, Lahad and van Hooff (Reference Lahad and van Hooff2023) locate their research in “the new theoretical framework of critical friendships,” which, they argue, needs to be developed and expanded if scholarship on friendship is to advance (575, 583). Other scholars have enriched our understanding of the ambivalence of friendship by studying friendship, power, and inequality in various contexts (e.g., Assan Reference Assan2024; Chan Reference Chan2025; Costas Reference Costas2012; Crawford Reference Crawford2021; Fine Reference Fine2021; Goedecke Reference Goedecke2022; Leighton Reference Leighton2020). As these scholars show, in settings as varied as corporations, universities and schools, illicit economies, or politics and public policy, informal friendship can make social practices of power more difficult for people to see or challenge. In this sense, friendship relations and discourses and their informal style are mechanisms by which organizational power and control persist, rather than merely tools to dismantle them.

The rise of critical approaches to friendship and their theoretical advances hold promise not only for developing a richer account of friendship but also for personal life and relatedness more broadly. The ideals of friendship that make it worth celebrating – choice, care, equality, and informality, to name a few – are not limited to friendship. Instead, they are ideals (or better, sacred symbols) that people draw on to build rewarding, connected lives and to think about and evaluate their social bonds, not only in private with friends but also with family, acquaintances, colleagues, and strangers (Mallory & Eramian Reference Mallory, Eramian, Alexander and Horgan2025). We see this idealizing tendency, for example, where kinship and friendship are suffused rather than opposed, as when people call a spouse or sibling a “best friend” to enhance the value of the relation (Davies Reference Davies, May and Nordqvist2019). The centrality of friendship ideals to modern values of choice, equality, and informality is part of broad transformations of personal life and has been at the core of theoretical debates in the area for the past thirty years (Bauman Reference Bauman2003; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim Reference Beck and Beck-Gernsheim1995; Giddens Reference Giddens1992; Jamieson Reference Jamieson1998; Smart Reference Smart2007). As we see it, to study the ambivalences of friendship is not simply to add a new dimension to round out a field of study. Theoretically, the problematic is more interesting since the characteristics of friendship that can make it rewarding are precisely the same qualities that can make it fraught or disappointing. To study friendship critically, then, is an invitation to rethink fundamental problems of connectedness and relatedness, such as choice and obligation, intimacy and rupture, sameness and difference, public and private, authenticity and impression management, or ideals and practices. To the extent that Euro-American relationships in general are undergoing “de-institutionalization” (Cherlin Reference Cherlin2009) and “informalization” (Costas Reference Costas2012; Wouters Reference Wouters2007), then to study friendship – the least institutionalized and most informal of all our relations – can open up research problems with broad potential, ones that let us approach pressing problems of the social sciences and late modern social life, including social solidarity and disconnection, the relationship between power and choice, and what makes for a worthwhile life and sense of self.

There is a timely need to renew and advance critical approaches to friendship, as the place of friendship in the lives of Euro-Americans and people around the world has undergone dramatic changes. As traditional kinship-based households and place-based communities decline, as divorce rates and the population of single women rises (Lahad Reference Lahad2017), and as more people live alone (Klinenberg Reference Klinenberg2012), people rely on friendship for moral and practical support and fulfillment in life. Once seen primarily as a pleasurable, informal “escape” from the pressures of romantic, familial, or professional relationships (Suttles Reference Suttles and McCall1970), friendship is now having a cultural moment in which people see it as intrinsic to “authentic” selfhood, to professional success (Boltanski & Chiapello Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2007), and to a good life more generally (Liming Reference Liming2023; Murthy Reference Murthy2020). Yet simultaneously, people worry they have no one they can talk to (Putnam Reference Putnam2000; Small Reference Small2017; Turkle Reference Turkle2017) or wonder if their friendships measure up to cultural ideals of intimacy, trust, and care (Eramian et al. Reference Eramian, Mallory and Herbert2024; Smart et al. Reference Smart, Davies, Heaphy and Mason2012). Indeed, the range of ways that friendship matters in people’s lives – including its troublesome aspects – remains poorly understood. Friendship can oscillate over time from easy and pleasurable to difficult and painful and back again. A robust understanding of modern friendship adequate to the social sciences must attend to the range of how people live, practice, and experience it, not only as a private relationship but also as one inextricably connected to larger publics, institutions, inequalities, social or political upheavals, and relational contexts.

Scholars long considered friendship as a bond that happens in the “cracks” of formal institutional life (Wolf Reference Wolf and Banton1966), and it was once low on the Euro-American “hierarchy of intimacy” (Budgeon Reference Budgeon2006) and considered less worthy of study (Blatterer Reference Blatterer2015). However, recent scholarship delineates friendship’s crucial roles – both practical and symbolic – in people’s lives (Allan Reference Allan2008; Jamieson et al. Reference Jamieson, Morgan, Crow and Allan2006; Miller Reference Miller2017; Pitt-Rivers Reference Pitt-Rivers2016; Roseneil & Budgeon Reference Roseneil and Budgeon2004; Smart Reference Smart2007; Spencer & Pahl Reference Spencer and Pahl2006). Friendship has traditionally been theorized as unlike other relationships since it tends to be free from the formal or legal implications of marriage, child-rearing, domestic partnerships, or the hierarchical features of kinship (Blatterer Reference Blatterer2015; Budgeon Reference Budgeon2006). Yet, as our contributors show, people are doing novel things with friendship such that it is more entangled with formal dimensions of personal or public life, be it workplaces, political movements, property ownership, or interactions in public, and therefore it raises critical new stakes for people. What happens to friendship as it gains recognition as a way people find support and satisfaction in life? How might varied cultural contexts, like the ones in which our contributors ground their work, shape ambivalent meanings and practices of friendship? Furthermore, how is friendship offering new ways of forging personal communities or producing new moral or practical problems? What does it mean that a traditionally informal relationship, one prone to unpredictable starts and ends, is emerging as a relationship people increasingly expect more from? And what might friendship do besides provide support, connection, or satisfaction in life?

The authors in this volume are anthropologists and sociologists, but they have expertise across the humanities and social sciences, including social and political theory, social psychology, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Beyond our shared interests in friendship, personal life, and sociability, we also share common theoretical and methodological commitments that shape this volume. Our approach to critical friendship is driven by interpretive perspectives in the social sciences that center on meaning and how it shapes everyday life, including symbolic interactionism and social psychology (Fine Reference Fine2021; Goffman Reference Goffman1956; Simmel Reference Simmel and Wolff1950), cultural sociology (Alexander Reference Alexander2003; Illouz Reference Illouz2012; Pugh Reference Pugh2015; Swidler Reference Swidler2001), and interpretive anthropology (Geertz Reference Geertz1973; Weber Reference Weber2019). With their focus on how the world looks to ordinary people and how those interpretations shape the things people do, these approaches are especially germane for attending to the constitutive tensions in the meanings people attribute to their relationships, experiences, and everyday practices. These theoretical tools elicit how friendship is fundamentally problematic, as people struggle to navigate its competing meanings and expectations, or as it becomes imbricated in public life or power relationships. Alongside interpretive approaches, our contributors draw on the rich traditions of critical theory, broadly understood (Berlant Reference Berlant2011; Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977; Foucault Reference Foucault and Rabinow1997; Honneth Reference Honneth1996; Illouz Reference Illouz2012). While critical theory encompasses a breadth of approaches, it has two fundamental interests: First, it reveals the routine operations of power, inequality, and the reproduction of social life, and second, it provides a “radical denaturalization of the established mode of social organization and punctures the commonsensical qualities of types of social interaction” (Kurasawa Reference Kurasawa2017: 13). Accordingly, our approach is to never take friendship for granted in its Western, commonsense forms, but to theorize it in relation to how power operates in both private and public life, and to understand it in its full range of expressions across cultural contexts, from the intimate and serious to the site specific and casual (May Reference May, May and Nordqvist2019). Methodologically, the contributors draw on rich qualitative data, much of which is based on long-term ethnographic research, and theoretical analyses to ground their chapters. Such approaches are especially suited to the volume’s overarching concern with how people interpret, value, evaluate, and practice friendship in everyday life.

While we are advancing a new approach to friendship, we do not see it as replacing “mainstream” research on it. Rather, it is only because the existing scholarship has established so well that friendship should be taken seriously that we can now move on to other questions. In the rest of this introduction, we will outline our critical friendship research program and how it can contribute to current scholarship on friendship and beyond.

A New Critical Approach to Friendship

In conceptualizing our program of research in critical friendship, our contributors interpret “critical” across its range of meanings, including essential or indispensable, involving judgment, finding fault, or decisive, for example, a critical moment. Each chapter enriches, refines, or advances debates on friendship in the social sciences by offering contemporary perspectives that delve into the ambivalences of friendship, what happens when it intersects with other relations or institutions, how it unfolds and finds meaning across private and public life, and the multiple ways that friendship might be forged, practiced, valued, or interpreted.

In our view, a critical approach to friendship must challenge the assumption that friendship is purely private; study friendship relationally across other institutions and relationships; refrain from assuming friendship is only easy or a reprieve from other relationships that take “work”; consider friendship across lines of social difference and inequality; attend to how dominant friendship ideals in the literature have been characterized by unmarked whiteness and colonial power; attend to imperfect friendships or those that have ended; study the margins of friendship, its ups and downs over time, and its beginnings and endings; study the spaces and contexts where friendships form and what enables and constrains them; study friendship across cultural contexts to understand diverse ways that the term is interpreted and mobilized; and, finally, not assume that friendship is necessary and acknowledge that a good life can be lived in many different ways. Not all of these are new strategies for studying friendship, of course. Sociologists and anthropologists have focused on the cultural and institutional contexts of friendship (Allan Reference Allan1989; Bell & Coleman Reference Bell and Coleman1999; Spencer & Pahl Reference Spencer and Pahl2006), and psychologists (Fehr Reference Fehr1995; Fehr & Harasymchuk Reference Fehr, Harasymchuk and Vangelisti2009; Hojjat & Moyer Reference Hojjat and Moyer2017, Reference Hojjat and Moyer2024) have focused on the formation, dissolution, and ups and downs of friendship. Rarely, however, are these strategies brought together to elicit the ambivalence of friendship as a core research question. Drawing out the ambivalence of friendship requires more than just practical research strategies. In addition to these methodological and practical considerations, we suggest three core themes in the current friendship scholarship, namely, choice, ideals, and contexts, that we can further develop in critical directions.

Why Do We Need a New Critical Approach?

Most contemporary approaches to friendship either romanticize its positive qualities or disparage its new forms for being superficial or contributing to a decline in civic life. As we have been arguing, common approaches to friendship have treated it as essential to human “social, psychological, and physical wellbeing” (Hojjat & Moyer Reference Hojjat and Moyer2017: xix). Dominant approaches have sought to uncover its unrecognized importance as “hidden social glue” (Spencer & Pahl Reference Spencer and Pahl2006; also Adams & Allan Reference Adams and Allan1998), as a model for ethical relationships (Rawlins Reference Rawlins2008), as a mode of recognition and self-making (Blatterer Reference Blatterer2018; Eramian & Mallory Reference Eramian and Mallory2022) or as a resource for addressing problems like political divides, loneliness, gender inequality, racism, disenfranchisement, the decline of the welfare state, or incivility (Allen Reference Allen2004; Hojjat & Moyer Reference Hojjat and Moyer2017; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2018; Schwarzenbach Reference Schwarzenbach2009). By contrast, not all established approaches see friendship as a solution, and they raise concerns about how the rise of private bonds signals the decline of public life. Indeed, scholars critique the rise of friendship as a sign of unbridled individualism, shrinking social capital and civic participation, and an overall decline in the quality or durability of relationships (Bauman Reference Bauman2003; Bellah et al. Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton2008; de Tocqueville Reference de Tocqueville2000; Putnam Reference Putnam2000; Riesman Reference Riesman2001; Sennett Reference Sennett1976). In sum, traditional approaches have largely asked whether the rise of friendship is good or bad for modern societies and personal lives.

Our approach in this volume will enrich and extend the problems that these foundational works raised, but rather than taking a normative stance on the rising importance of friendship, we ask instead how various meanings and practices of friendship – as positive or negative, as pleasurable or painful – take shape and unfold in ordinary people’s lives. Our volume therefore asks, as more people recognize the value of friendship, what new possibilities, problems, expectations, or ambivalences might it raise in modern personal life? A critical approach avoids both indiscriminately celebrating or disparaging friendship to consider instead its uneven, contradictory, and ambivalent possibilities. It is worth stressing just how powerful and influential the overly romanticized and idealized approach to friendship has been.

Romanticized approaches to friendship are part of a long intellectual tradition. By devoting two chapters of his Nicomachean Ethics to friendship, Aristotle (1985) developed a rich account that has influenced much of the scholarship on friendship that came after him, both in the classical traditions and in contemporary work (Pakaluk Reference Pakaluk1991). Today, scholars turn to Aristotle because his approach is so at odds with our current views that it can challenge taken-for-granted contemporary thinking. First, Aristotle (1985) associated friendship with virtuous action rather than intimacy, which elite men [sic] cultivate through shared activities. Second, he saw friendship not as a private bond oriented to leisure, but as a serious public and political issue tied to matters of justice (208, 1155a23). Accordingly, Aristotle has served as a resource for unsettling contemporary assumptions about friendship as always based in intimate talk or mutual disclosure and thus has inspired critical attitudes to how we think about friendship today (Allen Reference Allen2004; Schwarzenbach Reference Schwarzenbach2009).

Here we stress a quality of Aristotle’s work that is not at odds with contemporary views of friendship and that we believe a critical approach should reject, namely, his categorization of friendship into higher and lower types. In his distinctions between friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue, friendships based on pleasure and utility are “lesser,” because they bring in something other than friendship itself (getting pleasure, being useful) and are therefore not forged and valued for their own sake. Virtue friendship, the most complete form for Aristotle, is the highest type, reserved only for elite men. In his view, the more a friendship is entangled in everyday life, in networks of reciprocity, work, or pleasure, the less pure it becomes. By contrast, the more a friendship is based on the character and common actions of virtuous men, then the more perfect that friendship becomes.

This normative Aristotelian approach in which friendship is hierarchically categorized according to a pristine ideal still forcefully persists in both scholarly and everyday thinking about friendship that continues to center the unencumbered self. Here a critical approach needs to be cautious. One challenge with studying friendship is the wild openness of the term. How are we to distinguish between friends, on the one hand, and friends on the other hand? Blatterer (Reference Blatterer2015) refers to friendship as a “sinkhole” concept, full of sundry bonds of various types and qualities, about which it is impossible to avoid making both practical or analytical distinctions. In other words, scholars must distinguish between friendship’s various forms, yet these distinctions are often normative ones. Empirical researchers likewise face the problem of operationalizing friendship, given that their participants are working with a diverse set of relations under a single term and are often not even talking about the same kind of bond (Pahl Reference Pahl2000). Moreover, just being a friend can lead people to make these kinds of distinctions around higher and lower types. Indeed, our participants drew distinctions between the core friends in their lives and their broader collections of weak friendly ties by inventing their own terminology such as “real” friendships versus “friendships of convenience” (Mallory & Eramian Reference Mallory, Eramian, Alexander and Horgan2025). Conceptions of pure or perfect friendships are so persistent because culturally they serve as yardsticks for drawing distinctions between and ranking various kinds friendships.

In our view, such approaches to friendship can be analytically limiting because they easily lend themselves to the strange view that the more closely a friendship approximates traditional ideals, the more it counts as a “real” friendship. Conversely, the more casual, site specific, loosely defined, or fraught a friendship is, the less it might seem to be a friendship at all. We encountered participants in our research who claimed that a difficult friendship is not actually a friendship (cf. Smart et al. Reference Smart, Davies, Heaphy and Mason2012). We do not encounter this idea that a problematic relation is not really a relation in any other research on personal relationships. No one would argue that a troubled marriage is not a marriage, or that a fraught relation between siblings makes them less brothers or sisters. And while this difference stems in part from the kind of institution friendship is (an informal one) and the way people believe it is constituted (by choice), the view substantially limits the range of questions we can ask and the things we can notice about friendship (Eramian & Mallory, this volume). As we see in the quotation from Spencer and Pahl mentioned earlier, the assumption is that positive friendships are the “important” friendships. That might be true in some cases, but difficult ones should also be taken seriously as potentially important in people’s lives.

Challenging distinctions between idealized friendships and their corrupted, lesser forms, is one of the most important tasks of a critical approach to friendship. It is not the researcher’s job to define what a friendship “really” is. Indeed, everyday people have ways of drawing hierarchies of value in friendship, and the aim of research is to study those cultural schemas or mental maps as objects of analysis rather than uncritically reproduce them. Accordingly, the cultural meanings of friendship should become the object of analysis rather than something we take for granted. By questioning normative hierarchies of friendships and being reflexive about the assumptions on which those hierarchies are built, we can focus on the ambivalence and power inherent in friendship.

Among the most important things to reflect on in the Aristotelian hierarchy is the unmarked whiteness and masculinity of traditional friendship ideals and personal life scholarship more generally. As Carrier (Reference Carrier, Bell and Coleman1999) asks, who has the freedom to imagine or practice their friendships as unencumbered and based entirely on choice? Modern imaginaries of friendship are premised on dominant white Euro-American ideals of autonomous, individual personhood (Mallory Reference Mallory and Kurasawa2017). By contrast, for example, friendships between Black men or Black women are often theorized as inextricably entangled with the hardships of living in the dominant whiteness and structural racism of North American society. Indeed, scholars show how such friendships may provide emotional support, practical support, or respite from racism, sexism, and the relentless experience of being out of place in “white space” (Anderson Reference Anderson2021; Jackson Reference Jackson2024; Stack Reference Stack1974; Wherry et al. Reference Wherry, Seefeldt and Alvarez2019; Williams Reference Williams2018; see also Chan Reference Chan2025). Clearly these friendships, grounded in the world and shaped by prosaic challenges or mutual aid, are in no way “lesser” in terms of how they matter to people.

If challenging hierarchical typologies of friendship is a central task of a critical approach, another related challenge is to reject scholars’ tendency to see friendship as a panacea for personal, social, and political problems. Friendship can be powerful in people’s lives, but we should also be cautious about overstating its capacity – either as a “model relationship” in an ideal sense or a social bond in the concrete sense – to solve the problems facing our world today. In other words, we suggest a degree of skepticism toward the “friendship promotion” perspective, whereby scholars, politicians, activists, health care workers, or the wellness and therapeutic industries treat friendship as a good to be promoted, as a fix for problems ranging from loneliness, indifference, and political polarization to the excesses of consumer capitalism. The reason for our hedging, for stressing only caution, is that we do not want to downplay how powerful friendship can be or what social solidarity can accomplish. The research is clear on the possible goods of friendship and how friendships can tie us together in “tiny publics” (Fine Reference Fine2012) that matter for social and political life. Still, we hesitate when scholars or other actors treat a personal bond as a solution to the structural and institutional problems of modern societies. Few critical scholars today, for example, would promote marriage or childrearing as personal solutions to the structural problems of contemporary societies (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2006; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2022). We now have a much better understanding of the difficult dimensions of familial and kinship relations. With friendship, however, understandings of the difficult or ambivalent dimensions are still underdeveloped, and so friendship is regularly promoted as a solution to contemporary social and political problems (May Reference May2012). In a way, treating friendship as a good to be promoted inverts C. Wright Mills’s (Reference Mills1959) celebrated formulation of the sociological imagination, in that people are urged solve “public issues” from within the space of their own intimate, personal lives.

This “friendship promotion” perspective, we believe, is limited, but it is remarkable that so many scholars, experts, or cultural commentators imagine that promoting friendship can solve the major problems facing our world today, from neoliberalism to incivility to loneliness. Relationships matter of course, as does solidarity, but what we do with relationships and how and why we create them matters as well. Friendships can just as easily shore up inequalities and the workings of power as challenge them, just as it can enable capitalist exploitation or work against it (Mallory et al. Reference Mallory, Carlson and Eramian2021). To imagine otherwise is to commit the intellectual error that Heaphy and Davies (Reference Heaphy and Davies2012) identified at the core of contemporary friendship scholarship, which is treating friendship ideals as the solution to problematic realities of our other relational forms.

Outline of the Book

The book is divided into three core thematic sections. Each one takes up a key element of what it means to take a critical approach to friendship and offers distinct theoretical interventions in social science debates on friendship, with important implications for future work on what it means to take friendship as inherently problematic and “critical” in all meanings of the word.