The introduction to this volume advances its collective research agenda of renewing and advancing critical approaches to friendship and modern personal life. It outlines what a critical approach to friendship entails and delineates three central themes underlying debates in the social science literature on friendship: ideals, choice, and contexts. It both consolidates these debates and offers new directions for advancing them through a series of key interventions in critical approaches to friendship. These interventions are divided into the core thematic sections of the book: (1) critical intimacies, differences, and ruptures; (2) critical sociabilities beyond the private; and (3) critical relational junctures. The introduction also elucidates the thematic cohesion of the volume, emphasizing how the chapters are united by a commitment to ethnographic methods, interpretive theoretical approaches, and critical theory.

Rising dog ownership increases demand for dog-friendly public spaces. This need produces new kinds of interactions and relationships, and new sources of conflict and cooperation between park users. This chapter examines how the human–dog relationship mediates and modifies interpersonal relationship development and human friendship practices in public space. Drawing on 150+ hours of participant observation at dog parks, our analysis demonstrates the importance of public space to supporting “simple and single-stranded friendships” (Pahl & Spencer 2004). Through identifiable social patterns and rituals, the forced interactional work of dog-facilitated human–human interaction between regular users creates opportunities for meaningful relationship development, despite (and sometimes because of) incidences of dog-facilitated conflict also present in these spaces.

Friendship has its public life in urban spaces. Drawing on recent social constructionist approaches to the domestication of space in urban studies, and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the outdoor spaces of a mall in Beijing, China, this chapter explores how ordinary visitors domesticate the mall in their everyday lives. Focusing on the practice of friendship in three small groups, I trace how the mall’s spaces are (1) appropriated as “playgrounds” by after-school children, (2) negotiated as “informal childcare workshops” by guardians, and (3) claimed as “senior centers” by elderly visitors. I argue that the mall is not merely a backdrop for friendship, but that friendship practices constitute the mall beyond its default setting as merely a space for consumption. This chapter contributes to scholarship on modern friendship beyond the private realm and advocates for a more embracing conceptualization of friendship in urban spaces.

This chapter revisits “critical friendships,” exploring how moments of sociopolitical and health crises shape and challenge relational bonds. Drawing on UK-based studies of personal responses to Brexit and dating app use during COVID-19, we demonstrate that theoretical assumptions about friendship’s egalitarian and inherently “good” nature often fail to capture the complexities of lived experience. The Brexit study revealed how political differences strained friendships, yet participants often prioritized shared history over political alignment. The COVID-19 study found that while apps facilitated “suffused” relationships during lockdown, these relationships were ultimately disappointingly short-lived. Using Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” we demonstrate how the illusion of the ideal “pure” friendship creates an inevitable disappointment when such relationships prove unachievable. Yet despite these disappointments, the “goods” of friendship can still outweigh the “bads” of “the times” in the potential for new suffused relational forms, however fleeting, as well as in the effort expended to sustain friendships.

The category of friendship called “friends and fun” popularized via gay sex/dating apps captures a pre-existing reality among queer people around the world: that friendships include a continuum of sexual, romantic, and sentimental affects and practices. In Beirut, this category takes on specific utility amidst power relations that define (un)acceptable ways for embodying intimate relations: it enables queer men to conceal their intimacies by adjusting their behaviors to suit the norms of male–male friendship. As queer men move their relationships from the privacy of the bedroom to the publicness of the street, they act like friends while holding contrasting sexual and romantic affects under the surface of these embodied practices. The chapter argues that “friends and fun” derives its meaning from the practices men undertake as an embodied response to the sexual and gendered exigencies of public space, thus showing how friendship practices and categories do not merely challenge, but also shore up power relations.

Friendship in the workplace is alternately approached as a resource to be leveraged or a liability to be managed. In leadership development, where practitioners carefully cultivate their subjectivities, appearing adequately self-aware and open-minded is valued highly. How do leadership development practitioners’ use of complaints in their workplace, in ways both formal and informal, serve as an affordance for friendship? Considering this example raises questions about what it means to make friendship useful at work and in other contexts, and it suggests that separating the “goods” of friendship from the “bads” is a misleading and problematic endeavor.

Chronological age is a common feature in the organization of North American society. From institutional to everyday spaces and our cultural practices of association within these spaces, age segregation is the norm. Yet, intergenerationality persists in its various forms. One such space in which intergenerationality occurs is the skatepark, and one such form is that of organic intergenerational friendships forged between youth and adults. In this study, the phenomenon is explored through data gathered from eighteen semi-structured, on-site interviews with twenty participants at a skatepark in a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through these interviews, three main themes are identified: (1) making intergenerational friends at the skatepark, (2) practices of youth-adult intergenerational friendship, and (3) perceptions of youth-adult intergenerational friendship. These three themes contribute to the overall argument of the chapter that youth-adult intergenerational friendships simultaneously disrupt boundaries and patterns of age/generational differences in friendship while also reinforcing such differences in both subtle and explicit ways.

Even as friendship carries overwhelmingly positive connotations, the categories of “fair-weather friend” or “frenemy” indicate that less-than-ideal friendship is commonplace. What remains poorly understood is how people make sense of the persistence of their imperfect friendships. Drawing on studies of difficult friendships and friends who cohabitate, this chapter offers an interpretive perspective on how and why friendships that people characterize as difficult persist. Using the concept of the “good enough friend,” we unsettle ubiquitous yet simplistic directives of modern therapeutic culture to “cut off” difficult relationships. We argue that the potential for ease and difficulty are equally inherent to what friendship is, and that by attending to “difficult” ones and how people evaluate their worth, we can better understand how people navigate concord and conflict in personal life. We advance the intervention that a critical friendship must resist hierarchies of intimacy inherited from Western philosophical traditions that rank easy, pleasurable friendships as inherently “better” than ambivalent ones, which may also have core places in people’s lives.