Friendship,Intimacy,and the Contradictions of Therapy Culture

Abstract

While therapy culture has long been a part of the repertoires through which people think about and practice their romantic relationships, it has been less prominent in how they envision friendship. However, based on our interviews on experiences of friendlessness in an Atlantic Canadian city, we show that therapeutic styles increasingly shape how people orient to friendship, even as friends rarely seek formal therapy to manage their conflicts. This article focuses on how modern therapy culture, with its emphasis on individual wellbeing, self-knowledge, and ‘healthy’ rather than ‘toxic’ relationships, presents people with conflicting cultural imperatives for how to practice their friendships. On the one hand, therapy culture encourages people to seek out friends to whom they can disclose their most intimate feelings and experiences – friends who will offer support, understanding, and validation. On the other hand, therapy culture equally cautions that one must maintain ‘boundaries’ to protect oneself from friends’ personal revelations or ‘traumas.’ We ask what these dual imperatives mean for modern friendship and how people experience the tension between them. We argue that one reason modern friendship can be difficult is that divulging one’s intimate feelings or experiences to a friend can be interpreted as either building intimacy or burdening others with one’s problems, or crucially, both at the same time. Our findings lead us to ask how therapy culture might increasingly turn friendship into a reflexive object or something else to ‘optimize’ rather than providing an escape from relationships that demand ‘work.’

Scholars have long recognized that therapy culture deeply shapes how people think about and practice their familial and romantic relationships (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]; Illouz, 2008; Lasch, 1979; Rieff, 1966), but they are only beginning to attend to its place in perspectives on and expectations of friendship (Martinussen and Wetherell, 2021; McLeod and Wright, 2009). Some have even celebrated friendship because it escapes therapeutic culture and its ‘reifying tendencies’ (Blatterer, 2013: 443). However, our interviews on experiences of friendlessness in an Atlantic Canadian city show that therapy culture increasingly constitutes the dominant moral languages through which people orient to friendship and account for its troubles, even as friends rarely seek therapy to resolve their problems. How then are we to make sense of how friendship seems both at odds with formal therapeutic institutions and thoroughly permeated by the idioms, expectations, and ideals of broader therapeutic culture? This article focuses on how therapeutic culture, with its precepts of open communication, self-knowledge, authenticity, emotional expression, ‘self-care,’ and ‘healthy’ rather than ‘toxic’ relationships, presents people with conflicting imperatives for how to practice friendship. These tensions find expression in our interviewees’ accounts of the pursuit of intimacy and emotional support in friendship. On the one hand, therapy culture encourages emotional self-disclosures, being ‘vulnerable’ or ‘letting people in’ to build intimacy, exchanging emotional support, and uncovering one’s ‘true’ self. On the other hand, it equally cautions that ‘being there’ for others can be emotionally draining, and one must maintain ‘boundaries’ to protect one’s own health and happiness (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 100–101; Illouz, 2008: 126–127). Indeed, our interviewees valued ‘real talk,’ because they saw it as the basis of ‘real friendship’ and knowledge of others and themselves. Yet they were also concerned that intimate talk about friends’ hardships, whether framed as mental health struggles, past traumas, or ‘negativity,’ could undermine their wellbeing. In this article, we ask what these dual imperatives mean for modern friendship and how people experience the tension between them. How might therapy culture increasingly turn friendship into a reflexive object or something else to ‘optimize’ in the modern quest for personal satisfaction and social worth?

We take an interpretive, cultural sociological approach to foreground how the contradictions of therapeutic imperatives find expression in accounts and practices of friendship. Following Illouz (2008), we see ‘the therapeutic’ as a set of cultural resources that lets people accomplish things, in the case of our interviewees, forging or severing friendships, or accounting for one’s relative friendlessness. Therapeutic cultural resources suffuse our interviewees’ accounts of both the desirable sides of friendship, like intimacy and emotional support, and its adverse possibilities of susceptibility to others’ emotional struggles or ‘negativity.’ We argue that the same act of ‘opening up’ can be interpreted as either – or more likely, both – intimacy-building and burdensome. Friends can never be certain when their intimate disclosures will be interpreted as sharing confidences and ‘being real’ with friends or causing emotional ‘burnout,’ and, crucially, they can be read as both at the same time. The problem is that friendship ideals, like mutual support, ‘opening up,’ or not being ‘needy,’ are vague and do not provide clear directives for interpretation or action (Eramian and Mallory, 2021: 363). Our argument builds on the literature that exposes the contradictions in therapeutic culture (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]; Illouz, 2008) by showing how they emerge in accounts of friendlessness. Friendlessness is a germane experience through which to understand these contradictions, because as our interviewees worked to make sense of or justify their relative friendlessness, they drew extensively on the resources of therapy culture to both idealize the intimacy they felt they were missing and explain the dangers of friendship’s emotional burdens. Indeed, our interviews are constituted by accounts (Scott and Lyman, 1968) our participants offered to justify or explain their relative friendlessness, and it is these accounts and the contradictory therapeutic resources they are accessing on which we draw in this article. In other words, friendless people are especially reflective about friendship, think critically about it, and do not take it for granted. Accordingly, they are especially likely to turn to the cultural resources at hand, including therapy culture, to try to make sense of their situation or justify what is easily a stigmatizing position of having no friends. Still our interviewees are not trailblazers who have produced new overlaps between therapy culture and friendship, but people who are drawing on common cultural repertoires (Swidler, 2001). Indeed, scholars have shown that therapy culture and friendship are overlapping outside the friendlessness experience (Eramian and Mallory, 2021; Martinussen and Wetherell, 2021; McLeod and Wright, 2009), so our findings have broader implications beyond the lives of those in our study population.

We are not proposing that the contradictions of therapy culture are direct causes of people’s friendlessness, since friendships can and do flourish around them. Indeed, friendship is not ‘inherently either easy or difficult,’ and ‘both are always possible’ (Eramian and Mallory, 2021: 5). We aim to articulate one set of conundrums that people may face in friendship, specifically the contradictory ways that friends value and interpret practices of sharing emotions and seeking support.

This article has three sections. First, we outline debates in the literature on therapeutic culture in general and its relation to friendship specifically. Second, we discuss our research methods and the characteristics of our interviewees. Third, we present interview data that elicits the tensions people experience around intimate disclosure in friendships to advance our central argument about what people do with therapeutic cultural resources.

Therapeutic Culture and Friendship

We use the terms therapy/therapeutic culture to refer to ‘eclectic’ (Illouz, 2008: 12) manifestations of ‘psy’ discourse (Rose, 1996) in expert and popular knowledge. They find expression in formal therapist–patient relationships, but moreover in the everyday talk and practice of social relationships, in ‘emotional styles’ (Illouz, 2008: 14), in the cultural primacy of the psychological and emotional realms, and in faith in positive thinking and open communication to alleviate life’s problems (Aubry and Travis, 2015: 1–2; Madsen, 2014: 3, 10; Moskowitz, 2001: 4, 7). The therapeutic is a set of cultural resources (Swidler, 2001), an assortment of idioms, ideals, and practices including authenticity, communication, self-knowledge/realization, healthy/toxic relationships, boundary-setting, and self-care (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]; Illouz, 2008; Lahad and van Hooff, 2022). How have social scientists thought about therapy culture and its relationship to intimate relationships, especially friendship? And why are scholars only recently turning to its place in friendship? Since Euro-American friendship is characterized by informality and lack of institutionalization (Allan, 1989), friends rarely seek therapy to solve their conflicts (though see Sow and Friedman, 2021). Therefore, on the surface, therapy discourse appears little relevant to friendship. Nonetheless, our interview data suggest that we cannot apprehend the moral grammar of contemporary friendship without attending to the powerful forces of therapeutic culture.

For most experts, therapy culture’s ‘triumph’ (Rieff, 1966) represents a seismic shift in how people live, make, and interpret their social worlds, both in Euro-American society and beyond (Aubry and Travis, 2015; Furedi, 2004; Illouz, 2008; Madsen, 2014; Moskowitz, 2001; Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019; Salmenniemi, 2017). Even as some studies suggest that the reach of therapy culture is overstated based on numbers of respondents seeking professional help (Anderson et al., 2009), this argument leaves aside how therapeutic culture has infused informal support systems, relationships, and political and popular culture. Since therapy culture has made the self the sole source of liberation (Madsen, 2014: 3), it has powerfully transformed how people tell their life stories, how people account for success and failure, what they feel entitled to, and how they conceive of a good life (Illouz, 2008: 8, 156). It ‘reformulated the deepest level of identity symbols’ so effectively because its conduits were both the formal, expert knowledge systems of the psychological sciences and the informal, popular knowledge of the culture industries (Illouz, 2008: 5–7). Key debates on therapeutic culture have centered on its emancipatory potential and nefarious outcomes, but following Illouz (2008), our interest is less in whether its effects are good or bad. Rather, we aim to understand what people do with its cultural resources in interpreting intimate revelations and emotional support in friendship.

Classic communitarian critiques see in therapy culture a moral decline that drives people out of public life and into a fixation on the self and the private (Lasch, 1979; Rieff, 1966). Here, therapy culture is a depoliticizing force that turns political and structural problems into emotional and psychological issues (Cloud, 1997; Furedi, 2004; Moskowitz, 2001). Furedi (2004), for example, condemns how a therapeutic culture of ‘victimization’ in which selves are ‘at risk’ recasts social problems as emotional ones, while the therapeutic emphasis on public expression of emotional pain produces ‘hostility’ to the private realm (Furedi, 2004: 66, 125). By contrast, Bellah et al. (2008 [1985]: 141) argue that even as the therapeutic attitude has produced a new primacy of individual self-fulfillment, it is not necessarily overriding all traditional or public commitments. On the one hand, therapy culture has driven deep cultural transformations in which the ‘true self’ is the only legitimate basis of relationships, and obligations undermine self-fulfillment and independence (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 98, 101), but on the other, people are ‘seldom as selfish as the therapeutic attitude urges them to be’ (2008 [1985]: 112). They argue that people manage the dissonance between a radical commitment to the self and concrete obligations to others by configuring loyalty and sacrifice as choices (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 110). In this sense, even obligations can conform to therapeutic directives to ‘be true to yourself.’

Foucauldian- and Marxist-inspired critiques see therapy culture as hobbling progressive social movements and exerting new forms of ‘productive’ social control and self-surveillance (Lasch, 1979; Rose, 1996). Scholars criticize therapy culture for how its ideals of authenticity and individual empowerment align with ‘neoliberal’ principles of personal responsibility (Foster, 2016; Madsen, 2014; Rose, 1996). They also oppose the psychologization of social problems, which burdens individuals with both the causes of their suffering and the responsibility to overcome it (Cloud, 1997; Foster, 2016: 113), even when it is rooted in collective crises or broad forces like marketization. In these perspectives, therapy culture’s emphasis on individual empowerment to overcome both ordinary challenges and extraordinary crises aligns with market logics of personal wellbeing (Madsen, 2014: 115, 134). While these critiques raise important connections between therapeutic culture and broader political culture, they may overstate the degree to which the therapeutic has been ‘thoroughly instrumentalized’ (Foster, 2016: 99) by ‘neoliberal’ agendas. As Illouz (2008: 4) argues, such approaches tend not to robustly account for social actors and what they might do with therapeutic culture beyond conforming to the politics of personal responsibility. Indeed, people can engage critically and selectively with therapy culture, and it can produce dispositions that both align with and contest capitalist values (Salmenniemi, 2017: 617, 624).

For other scholars, the political and cultural consequences of the therapeutic are more ambivalent. Nehring and Kerrigan (2019) note the pernicious alliance between popular psychology and capitalism, yet they also analyze self-help books as ‘bearers of cultural meanings’ (2019: 14) that Trinidadians use to make sense of intimate life. In Illouz’s (2008) ground-breaking analysis of modern therapy culture, she traces how a therapeutic emotional style has permeated workplaces and popular culture and upended traditional gender hierarchies and stereotypes, yet its rise also signals a new ‘emotional capitalism’ with its own modes of stratification. Scholars might acknowledge that therapy culture exerts new forms of moral regulation or threatens traditional political resistance, but they also argue that it provides resources for navigating the uncertainties of post-socialism, managing the pressures of enterprising selfhood, fostering public recognition of private suffering, asserting claims to adulthood when its traditional markers are elusive, and new cultural repertoires through which to express injury to the self (Illouz, 2008: 121; Salmenniemi, 2017; Silva, 2013; Swan, 2008; Wright, 2008). In these analyses, therapeutic culture has a politicizing tendency, as in the second wave feminist dictate that the personal is political, in contrast to what Rieff (1966) and others identify as its depoliticizing tendencies.

While scholars like Moskowitz (2001) have shown that therapy culture emerged as early as the late 1800s to early 1900s in experts’ attempts to address poverty and illness, its principles did not figure into scholars’ understandings of friendship until much more recently. Mid-20th-century accounts of friendship tend not to characterize it in therapeutic terms, like emotional revelations and the pursuit of self-knowledge for improved wellbeing. They foreground instead a non-therapeutic perspective on friendship in which it is an escape from marital pressures that ultimately upholds conventional gender roles (Jerrome, 1984), a reflection on one’s character (Paine, 1969: 511), or a relationship where friends can enjoy impropriety, humor, let off steam, or orient outward to the wider world together instead of inward toward the self (Lewis, 2017 [1960]; Suttles, 1970). Where emotional support does appear in these earlier accounts of friendship, it is often characterized as talking through problems to arrive at courses of action and thus blends with practical support (Allan, 1989: 52–53), as opposed to a therapeutic view in which communicating feelings is intrinsically valuable for building friendships. Still, it would be a mistake to see all contemporary care practices between friends as therapeutic. Non-therapeutic care practices between friends endure in practical support like transportation to medical appointments, or strategizing about a work problem (Bowlby, 2011: 608). Friendship also offers non-therapeutic forms of care when friends become ‘de facto families’ that offer material support or a sense of social belonging, especially for ‘non-heterosexuals’ (Weeks et al., 2001: 52). The question arises, then, whether it is friendship or care practices that have been partly suffused with therapy culture, but given that our interviewees explicitly invoked therapeutic idioms to make sense of friendlessness experiences, we think it is worth taking seriously the uneasy alignment of friendship and therapeutic directives.

Despite the ongoing salience of non-therapeutic care practices in friendship, a growing literature shows that therapy culture permeates friendship, though it is ambivalent about the consequences. As McLeod and Wright (2009) argue, the therapeutic attitude is not just a repressive site of ‘belabored selfhood’ (McGee, 2007), and it also appeals to people for the sense of competence and pleasure they derive from supporting their friends. In the therapeutic project of self-improvement, post-feminist friendship offers contradictory appeals as relationships in which women support each other to become their ‘best,’ most ‘authentic selves’ and as refuges from those same therapeutic pressures of self-optimization (Martinussen et al., 2020). Martinussen and Wetherell (2021: 5–6) explicitly raise the idea of friends as therapists/patients (cf. Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 100–101; Salmenniemi, 2017: 622), as emotional revelations are a normative feature of women’s friendships that serve the ‘perceived need for self-fulfillment through authenticity’ (Illouz, 2008: 124, 126–127). However, they also note that the imperative of intimate disclosure in friendship comes with perils, as friends can be perceived to disclose too much by being ‘overdramatic’ or too vulnerable in contravention of postfeminist ideals of confident resilience and cheerful ‘bouncing back’ (Martinussen and Wetherell, 2021: 6, 10–11). In contrast to studies wherein people reported satisfaction from applying therapeutic strategies in friendship, Eramian and Mallory (2021) argue that therapeutic directives for open communication can compound friendship pain when friends’ refusal to talk leads people to look inward to understand why friends exited their lives.

Following scholars who foreground the contradictions of therapeutic culture, our interest is in how it – like all cultural systems – does not offer simple or consistent guidelines for action. Illouz (2008: 122) writes of romantic love and intimacy as a site where the contradictions between ‘care and nurturance’ and ‘autonomy and self-reliance’ find expression. Our interest is in how a similar duality unfolds in friendship, as our interviewees struggled with the quest for intimacy and its perils. Can people indeed live coherent lives from a ‘medley of contradictory values, ill-assorted beliefs, and varied interests and techniques’ as Gluckman (1958: 26) famously argued? To what extent do people see and feel these contradictions as they live out friendship in everyday life, and do such inconsistencies matter to them? We follow the approach to cultural contradictions and inconsistencies in interviewees’ accounts that Sølvberg and Jarness (2019) propose. Rather than trying to tease out what interviewees ‘really’ think when we encounter tensions in their views, justifications, or perspectives, we take these as a way to faithfully reflect the very real contradictions that participants face in everyday life. When contradictory perspectives or commitments emerge in interviews, these are not barriers to understanding our participants’ lives, but are the very substance of how people struggle with fundamental moral questions about what makes for a worthwhile life. In this way, we can attend to the various cultural schemas or discursive toolkits (Blair-Loy, 2009; Swidler, 2001) that may both generate contradictions in people’s perspectives and offer resources for working through them.

Methods

This article draws on a study we conducted from 2021 to 2022 on experiences of friendlessness in an Atlantic Canadian city. Of our 20 interviewees, 9 were women and 11 were men. Interviewees ranged in age from their late teens to their mid-70s. Three interviewees identified as visible minorities, and 5 as sexual minorities or as having undetermined orientations. We use the identity markers that our interviewees used to describe themselves, so we sometimes use different terms for the same identification, for example, ‘straight’ and ‘heterosexual.’ Just under half of our interviewees worked in middle-class professions, like law, veterinary medicine, or software engineering or were university students, but most were in skilled or low-skill working-class occupations, such as tradesperson, transit worker, restaurant cook, warehouse technician, groundskeeper, or factory worker. Most interviewees were single and lived alone, though some had partners, spouses, children, or other family members in their lives.

We recruited participants by posting flyers in public places such as grocery stores, cafes, libraries, and small businesses, by posting a call on our personal Twitter accounts, and on the ‘Friendship and Networking’ page on our local classifieds website. Recruitment materials invited people who self-identified as having few or no friends to participate in an interview. Since we sought to understand people’s perceptions of their relative friendlessness, we did not impose a limit on the number of an interviewee’s friendships as a participation criterion. Some identified as having no friends, others as having few friends or friendships that they felt were inadequate in some way. Furthermore, friendlessness is not a permanent or timeless state, and most interviewees discussed having had friends in the past but having lost them for a variety of reasons. Many were actively seeking to make new friends and may well have some again in the future. All interviews were conducted by one of the authors either in a private office, in semi-public places, or remotely by videoconferencing and in one case by phone, and they lasted between one and two hours. All names are pseudonyms and we have changed other identifying information to protect participants’ privacy.

Interviews were semi-structured. We posed a series of questions about the meaning of friendship, their friendship history, their experiences of relative friendlessness, and their views on cultural perceptions of friendless individuals. We did not ask direct questions about our interviewees’ familiarity with the terminology of therapeutic culture; thus, the themes we analyze in this article emerged inductively during the coding process. All three researchers coded the interviews and produced a single master codebook to identify both in-vivo codes and analytical themes. We identified points of convergence and divergence in interviewees’ experiences of friendlessness, and we paid particular attention to the tensions, ambivalences, and contradictions in our interviewees’ perspectives. We also produced a spreadsheet to organize principal themes across the interviews, including how each person explained their friendlessness, whether or not they saw it as a problem, the hardest and most advantageous things about having few or no friends, and the overall arc of the stories they told about their friendship experiences. Our analysis is grounded in the classic anthropological interpretive tradition (Geertz, 1973) and cultural sociology (Illouz, 2008). These perspectives informed our aim of grasping our interviewees’ points of view, which we brought into practice by encouraging them to describe their expectations and experiences of friendship. The present study contributes to debates on the cultural implications of the therapeutic attitude by locating evidence of therapy culture’s competing imperatives in our interviewees’ ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) of their experiences of friendlessness.

Strikingly, not one of our interviewees failed to invoke therapeutic idioms or values in making sense of their friendship difficulties, which was what compelled us to investigate the contradictory ways they put these ideas to work. It is worth noting that both therapy culture and interviews have an individualizing tendency, so the setting of the interview may make it especially likely that interviewees draw on therapeutic principles and ideas rather than structural or institutional ones, like retirement. However, some interviewees also wove such explanations in with their therapeutic ones. One interviewee, Arlene, explicitly likened the interview to a therapy session, as she felt she had a revelation about the patterning of her feelings of low self-worth during the course of the interview.

We did not notice significant variations in the conjunction of friendship and therapy culture across participants’ socioeconomic class positions, ages, gender identities, or sexuality, as therapy culture is so ubiquitous it is increasingly accessible to anyone. Indeed, while Illouz (2008) treats therapeutic resources as middle-class forms of cultural capital, McLeod and Wright (2009) show that working-class people skillfully draw on them as well. Given that fewer than half of our interviewees worked in middle-class professions, our findings suggest just how widespread therapeutic styles are across class positions. Indeed, some of our working-class participants, like Steven, a retired transit driver whom we mention later, were some of the most fluent users of therapeutic idioms. While in interviews with some older participants, like Harold, a wildlife photographer in his 70s, usages of therapeutic idioms were less pronounced, Harold nonetheless emphasized that he wanted a friend to whom he could disclose his ‘innermost thoughts,’ and saw this kind of authentic self-expression as a valuable end in itself. Much like Bennett (2011) argues that the ‘optimism of everyday life’ is inseparable from routine social and cultural processes and relationships, it is precisely because therapy culture is so mainstream and permeates so many institutions that it forms the common sense of our time. So much is this the case that it can be difficult to tell the difference between therapy culture and more general contemporary cultural frameworks.

Conflicting Therapeutic Imperatives: Opening up vs. Shielding the Self

Some interviewees explicitly elided the distinction between ‘real’ friendship and therapy (cf. Martinussen and Wetherell, 2021), and they linked intimate disclosures to friends with the quest for happiness and self-knowledge (McLeod and Wright, 2009: 123). Such elisions also emerged when interviewees resented being treated as a therapist by a friend. Dayana, who identified as having few friends, was particularly striking on the idea of friendship as therapy. She described herself as a trans woman of Caribbean origin with a traumatic past.

[T]he points of friendship that mean the most to me is when someone is sharing something about their life that they need help with. Or when I’m sharing something about my life that I need help with. To me, that creates a bond between two people. A strong bond. And in my mind, that is counselling. Whether they’re counseling me, or we’re counseling each other, or we’re just sharing and letting each other be. You know? That’s, to me, that’s friendship. Everything else is flat [. . .] [D]o you ever really know someone unless you know what they actually struggle with? I don’t think so [. . .] For me, friendship means counseling. Friendship means real talk. Friendship means love, loyalty, and devotion.

For Dayana, meaningful friendship is predicated on a therapist–patient style in which each can rely on the other for counseling, and she went on to say how she wished she had more friends for this reason. While she prided herself on her competence in the language and practice of therapy (cf. McLeod and Wright, 2009) and on offering counsel to friends, as we will see later, she also saw these relationships as dangerous to her wellbeing.

Ali, an artist of South Asian and British descent in his 50s, also described one of his closest friendships as based on a therapeutic style.

[My friend] told me that I’ve truly helped her with her mood, and with her communication improving, and I’ve taught her a lot through my therapeutic efforts. I still try to practice a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy techniques, and that sort of thing. So we have a little bit of that mentorship [. . .] But she’s very independent as well, and resistant to, you know, being taken care of, or whatever, and I’ve broken through that wall, finally.

Ali used the logic of therapy not only to describe how he mentors his friend to help her improve her communication skills, but also to describe the trajectory of their friendship. He relied on the therapeutic idea that intimacy is rare and ‘hard-won’ (Illouz, 2008: 126–127) when he spoke of having ‘broken through’ her ‘wall.’ While most of our interviewees were less explicit than Dayana and Ali about the therapist–patient dimensions of their friendships, they nonetheless articulated the therapeutic hallmarks of emotional intimacy and disclosure of one’s feelings or ‘struggles’ to build meaningful friendships, along with the perils of these revelations.

Intimacy, Openness, and Emotional Support in/as Friendship

Our interviewees produced striking accounts of friendship that foregrounded the core therapeutic idea that open talk by authentic selves is the basis of intimate relationships (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 98). Such was the case when Ali spoke of Carol, a woman more than 20 years his senior with whom he enjoys an intimate friendship based on disclosure of their personal lives:

Carol and I have an incredibly deeply conversational open relationship. She’s like nobody I’ve ever met in my life. But we have this conversational chemistry, and this, like, openness in our relationship. Ever since I met her, she’s just been like an open book. Total wild woman. Love her to death. She will talk about, like, last night, she’s 76 years old, and we’re talking about our sex lives. We’re very, you know? Very open. We have that kind of comfort level and that kind of intimacy and openness with each other.

While for Ali, personal revelations were part of the pleasure of their friendship’s intimacy and a normative part of a true friendship (cf. Martinussen and Wetherell, 2021: 5), for Bruce, a heterosexual software developer of European descent in his 30s, talking intimately with his two friends fulfilled his need for support in his mental health struggles:

I think without friends, feeling social depression is significant. Like, it’s very high. I’ve never been to the point where I thought, like, suicidal or anything like that because of no friends, but it’s hard in terms of my own mind attacking itself every day. And friends make it so that doesn’t happen as much. Right? They make it so that I can talk to somebody and get those thoughts out, and without that, my head would just pop. [laughs] Like, there would be so much built up in there that I wouldn’t be able to function anymore. It would just probably shut me down. So, I mean, if depression ever hit, [I] instantly call my friends. Yeah, I’m just, like, I need to talk for an hour.

Bruce’s perspectives draw out the tension between affection and instrumentality in friendship (Rawlins, 2008), as he is explicit about treating his friends as sources of therapeutic relief when he needs to talk even as he also spoke elsewhere about intrinsically valuing them. As we will see later, however, Bruce sometimes saw similar quests for support from his friends as dangerous to his mental health.

Isabelle, a white, bisexual, 18-year-old university student, was explicit on the therapeutic importance of intimate disclosure with friends so that you can better know yourself (cf. Illouz, 2008: 159; Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019: 2). She identified as having few friends, a status that she explained has its advantages:

I think it makes me more emotionally connected to both myself and to other people, because I can talk about my emotions with other people. And frequently have, like, emotional, or just deeper conversations than more surface-level ‘what did you do, like, what are you into’ type of stuff. So I feel like it both helps me to know myself better and also to know other people better.

Isabelle typifies the therapeutic view that emotions are ‘a privileged source of truth about the self’ (Swan, 2008: 89) and are therefore the path to connections to others.

Interviews with participants who identified as having no friends rather than few drew out perhaps with the greatest clarity the cultural importance placed on friendships inflected with the therapeutic style. Will, a straight, white student in his 20s explained it the following way:

I feel like it’s healthy to, like, express your emotions to other people rather than yourself sometimes. And I feel like I can’t do that, and I have to turn it inwards instead of taking it out of my body. If that makes sense. That’s kind of problematic. Like, it’s harder to process stuff going on in my life without a third perspective [. . .] I mean, sometimes I just feel isolated a little bit. I can’t reach out to people that I need that intimacy and trust with to talk about important stuff.

Here, Will raised the classic therapeutic logic of the ‘talking cure,’ in which talking about one’s struggles is the path to resolving them. For him, having no friends meant he had no one with whom he could engage in the ‘healthy’ practice of sharing his emotions.

Not all of our interviewees were equally well-versed in therapeutic idioms, but they still expressed the importance of intimacy and trust in ‘true’ friendships. For example, Mike, a white, heterosexual retired police officer in his 70s, peppered his perspectives with profanity and humor in a way that belied his genuine longing for a friend with whom he could have a ‘heart-to-heart’:

Yeah, not having somebody that you can rely on, or having somebody that you can sit down and have an old heart-to-heart about maybe things that you’re struggling with in life, right? I can’t do that because I can’t trust any of them. You think I’m going to [my next-door neighbors ] Carl and Sandy saying I’m having erectile dysfunction? I don’t fucking think so. Right? Not that I’m having that, but you know what I’m saying, right? Because it’ll be all over town, ‘eh, the old cock can’t get it up,’ right? That’s the thing; you don’t have anybody to sit down with one-on-one, a heart-to-heart, boom boom boom, it’s going no further than this room.

While Mike repeatedly expressed his confidence that he has value and is a ‘good person’ despite his friendlessness, for other interviewees lacking a close confidant led them to look inward for an explanation as to what might be ‘wrong’ with them (cf. Eramian and Mallory, 2021; Smart et al., 2012). As Jennifer, an office worker in her 30s explained, ‘I think I have a lot of insecurity, and I’m really self-conscious, and so maybe my friendships only go so far before they sort of stop.’ Likewise, Candace, a heterosexual, white animal rehabilitator in her late 20s, spoke about one friend with whom she was trying to build a ‘real’ friendship through intimate disclosure. As she explained, it wasn’t working, in part because she didn’t feel a ‘connection,’ and in part because she thought she was ‘playing a mind game with myself and making it hard on myself.’ Candace thought she could have more friends if she could ‘do things differently.’ When asked what she thought those things were, she said, ‘I guess just letting people in more. Like, letting myself enjoy socializing with them more, instead of feeling kind of on guard or a little awkward around them. But, I mean, I don’t know how to change that, so [laughs].’ For Candace, her lack of true friendships can be traced to her own need to first work on herself, to pursue therapeutic imperatives of ‘letting people in’ to build connections (cf. Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 99–100).

Sean, a heterosexual, white lawyer in his 30s who identified as having no friends, also wished for a friend with whom he could speak frankly, and he wondered what might be wrong with him that might account for his friendlessness:

[If I had friends], I think the amount of filtering that I would need to do would be significantly different. So, for example, if I was going through a mental health crisis, I know previously I’ve had times where I had a high degree of anxiety, [and] I know I wasn’t comfortable telling my family, I couldn’t tell people at my work or school. You know, just something that I kept kind of balled up [. . .] When I say lack of confidant, I mean a confidant [with whom I have] very minimal filters, is, you know, a big issue in terms of me being able to process my thoughts and having someone to talk to. And there is that self-reflection of, ‘oh geez, what the hell is wrong with me? Can’t I have a normal, you know, interaction and have things that normal people have?’ [. . .] Like geez, it doesn’t come naturally to me, you know? [laughs].

Like Jennifer and Candace, Sean exhibited the reflexive monitoring imperative of therapy culture (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 139; Illouz, 2008: 122, 150) as he wondered what was wrong with him that undermined his quest for a confidant. Whether people came to our study because they had few friends or no friends, what was striking was the tremendous value they place on therapeutic ideals of intimacy through sharing personal hardships. And yet, these valued aspects of self-disclosure were only one side of the story.

Burdens and Dangers of Supporting Friends

As much as interviewees extolled the virtues of emotional revelation as the foundation of friendship, they also said that ‘being there’ for friends through their tribulations could endanger their own mental health or satisfaction with life. As Harold, the wildlife photographer introduced earlier tersely put it:

And so, if you have a friendship, how deep is your friendship? How much crap are you going to put up with? And I will tell you, there is crap that’ll come down the line in some way or other. Then the next thing is, how do you deal with it?

Other interviewees, like Doug, a retired taxi driver, and Arlene, a former salesperson, explained their friendlessness through their reluctance to burden others or ‘intrude’ in their lives by making friendship overtures or sharing their problems, which suggests they are sensitive to the burdens they might impose on potential friends. As many of our interviews show, therapeutic culture tells us that the self has limited emotional energy, which people must judiciously distribute among deserving others in their lives. What is perhaps surprising is that this is not just a problem of lop-sidedness concerning which friend is offering and receiving support. For some interviewees, reciprocity might have resolved their feelings of being overburdened, but for others, even a friend who offered mutual support could still be hard on their mental health. Indeed, the therapeutic attitude, despite its core principle that individuals are the source of their own problems, happiness, and worth (Foster, 2016; Madsen, 2014) belies a strikingly porous view of the social person (Carsten, 2004), one vulnerable to others’ negativity or personal struggles.

Steven, a white, heterosexual retired transit worker in his 60s who had no friends, referred to ‘deep personal connections’ as ‘life giving,’ but he had not had that kind of friendship in over 20 years. He tried to make friends after moving to the city, but he found that everyone he befriended burdened him by talking too much about their problems, dropped their ‘psychological baggage’ on him, or only wanted to drink heavily which made it hard to be ‘authentic’ with each other. Steven explained that he had given up trying to make friends, because he no longer trusted his own judgment to discern a real friend from those who will burden him. In his view, people who ‘bend his ear’ excessively risk producing a patient–therapist relationship, which for him – in contrast to interviewees like Dayana who elided friendship and therapy – is not friendship. Still, Steven wished for a male confidant with whom to share the ‘experience of being a man in society,’ and he drew on therapeutic idioms when he complained that men are hesitant to be ‘vulnerable.’ What Steven seemed to be seeking was some ideal, yet elusive balance of enjoyment and emotional revelation in his friendships. He wanted someone with whom to share funny stories, but he found those who are ‘celebratory’ all the time are too ‘one-dimensional.’ He wanted a friend who would ‘let his guard down’ with him, yet the people he had befriended had talked too openly and frequently about their problems. Steven’s perspectives thus typify the tension we draw out in this article between the desire for intimacy and the perils people identify in being someone else’s ‘sounding board.’ Strikingly, Steven did not seem to be explicitly aware of these contradictions in his perspectives. Rather, the idea for him seemed to be that when you meet the ‘right’ friend, the tension disappears, which casts the problem as one of poor individual judgment about how much emotional support to expect from a friend rather than a fundamental cultural contradiction of the institution.

Audrey, a white, heterosexual student in her 20s, explained that she has no one nearby she considers a friend, but she has many acquaintances who rely on her: ‘I’ve found myself surrounded by a lot of people that have very big things going on in their lives. And it is very emotionally draining to constantly have that on myself, and to be helping those people out.’ She went on, ‘I was always the go-to person whenever something happened, you call Audrey. Audrey will know what to do. And then [when I say] “hey, I’m having a bad day, anybody want to come over and have a glass of wine?” suddenly nobody was available.’ For Audrey, reciprocity would have helped offset the drain of supporting others, but she was frustrated that she could not get mutual support: ‘I’m not burning myself out helping you all the time through everything you need. I feel that give and take needs to be equal. And I can’t get that with people.’

For other interviewees, however, reciprocal support was not enough to resolve the burdens of bearing others’ hardships. Candace spoke about a former friendship in which they were both going through difficult emotional times, and in which they did try to support each other. However, Candace noted that each thought the other was ‘too much’ to handle:

And one day, she just kind of said, ‘I don’t want to, I can’t, like, be your friend anymore. Like, I can’t deal with you anymore.’ Which I thought was strange, because I think we were both emotionally upset, and, like, generally going through late-20’s angst. But from my perspective, and I think other people’s, she was far more to manage than myself [. . .] She would be the kind of person to call me, and I’d go to her house, and she’d just be, like, naked on the floor, crying.

According to Candace, her friend ended their relationship because she could no longer deal with Candace’s emotional struggles, while Candace felt her friend was the one who was harder to ‘manage,’ a claim she bolstered by saying others agreed that her friend was more difficult. In any case, Candace’s account suggests that both friends turned to therapeutic justifications of the primacy of self-care and boundaries in deciding to withdraw from each other.

Dayana’s views expose ambiguous perspectives around reciprocity and whether it offsets the hazards of friends’ intimate revelations to the self. She found herself in a bind between the feelings of self-worth and competence she derived from counseling friends (McLeod and Wright, 2009), and the ‘burnout’ she experienced:

In return [for counseling], I don’t expect anything. However, I do tend to burn myself out by trying to help everyone [. . .] I like talking to people, and I listen and I memorize and I pay attention to their struggles. So, every person that I have let in, I’ve been there for. And then eventually, I get exhausted, which doesn’t happen too often, but it has happened a couple times, and I need someone, and oftentimes no one’s available. That kind of stings [. . .] It didn’t seem draining, because it seemed like I had emotional batteries for days. And I, I do. It’s like the stamina I have in a fight. Eventually I will always come back to having more, but I didn’t realize that I could burn out emotionally, because I never had to deal with all that I’m dealing with right now.

Dayana expressed ambiguous perspectives on reciprocity, as she said she expects nothing in return for her counseling, but she also noted that it ‘stings’ when no one is there for her and that she can ‘burn out’ when she does not get support. Dayana’s perspectives highlight the central problem of this article especially clearly, as for her counseling and friendship are inseparable, yet simultaneously she worries that bearing others’ burdens drains her and causes burnout. Indeed, she interprets counseling her friends as both intimacy-building and a risk to her own wellbeing, and it was striking in the interview how she struggled with how to make sense of that tension, whether she has boundless emotional energy to give or whether she has limits. Like Steven, Dayana never explicitly acknowledged the contradictions in her desires around friendship and intimacy. During the interview, she went back and forth several times about whether she expected support in return from her friends, which shows she was grappling with something that mattered to her. And yet, she struggled with pinpointing the precise problem that ‘counseling’ and intimate talk were central to her sense of herself and her worth, but also something she found draining. What this suggests is just how hard this tension might be to see, since both building intimacy and maintaining boundaries for one’s own wellbeing are both so thoroughly part of modern therapeutic common sense.

Individualistic views of the self in therapy culture (Madsen, 2014) notwithstanding, therapeutic imperatives to shield the self from others’ problems reveal a view of the self as porous (Carsten, 2004) and vulnerable to contagion from others’ ‘negativity’ or poor mental health. Bruce’s justifications for cutting off a friendship speak to these therapeutic idioms of contagion from which the self needs protecting:

[Andy] was on depression meds. I was trying to help him, but at the same time, when you can’t help that person anymore, like you’ve tried and tried and tried, then it’s just on them. They’ve got to be able to switch that little switch in their brain to be, like, I need the help or want the help and then reach out. Right? So I had to just kind of end that friendship, because it was so toxic that I was, like, ‘I can’t hang out with you anymore, it’s detrimental to my own health if I’m around you.’ Coming to realize that it was hard, but it had to be done [. . .] It’s hard to keep a friend that is constantly talking down to themselves [. . .] so it’s like, well, at what point do you not want to be friends with this person anymore? For the same thing I’m doing, just in my own head, right?

Bruce explained that he tried to support Andy, yet he acknowledged that he cut ties with him for going through the same internal struggles as he was, which seemed to trouble him. More than any other interviewee, Bruce saw and acknowledged the tension between needing to confess his intimate feelings to his friends and feeling overburdened by Andy’s similar needs. He acknowledged the double standard his conduct raised when he said he was doing the same thing as Andy in his own head, and he tried to resolve that unease through the therapeutic justification that the ‘only measure of the good is what is good for the self,’ and one must always ask of relationships, ‘Is this going to work for me now?’ (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 109, 129). Bruce framed ending this ‘toxic’ friendship as difficult but necessary, because his friend’s contagious negativity was ‘detrimental’ to his health. And herein lies the tension in this article, as therapeutic directives lead people to seek from others precisely what they try to shield themselves from. It is therapeutic common sense that people depend on others to uncover their authentic selves and manage the burdens of both ordinary and extraordinary happenings in their lives (Bellah et al., 2008 [1985]: 119–120; Illouz, 2008), yet equally those intimate revelations are thought to drain people’s emotional energy and raise dilemmas about the imperative to care foremost for the self. Our interview data thus uncover how the therapeutic provides cultural resources through which people puzzle through these countervailing friendship expectations, though never with a decisive resolution.

The interpretive ambiguity between whether personal disclosures build intimacy or burden others matters because it leads people to turn friendship increasingly into a reflexive object or something to optimize, even as it is rarely clear what that optimal friendship might look like. The therapeutic attitude encourages reflexive monitoring of self, others, and relationships. These monitoring practices were readily apparent in our interviews, as many people felt their friendships were not good enough and wanted better ones, for example Dayana who had just deliberately reduced the number of friends in her life, or Audrey who felt her friendships were one-sided. Indeed, many ‘friendless’ people were not completely isolated but felt none of those relationships measured up to what they wanted friendship to be. In our interviews, we see how the therapeutic attitude rationalizes and instrumentalizes friendship and turns it into a reflexive object. Rationalization is evident when people ask themselves questions like, ‘what am I getting out of this friendship?’ ‘How does this friendship make me feel?’ ‘Are we having enough fun together?’ ‘Do I feel understood and supported?’ Or ‘am I being myself?’ Such questions were especially visible in Steven’s interview (among others) when he reflected on the shortcomings of the friendships he had made in later life. Likewise, we see instrumentalization when people treat friendship as a means toward self-development, mental or physical health, or increased happiness, as we saw particularly clearly in Bruce’s interview when he talked about needing his friends when struggling with mental health problems. In other words, the influence of therapy culture makes it easy for people to take an intellectual or analytical attitude to their friendships, second-guess themselves, and wonder if a friendship is what it ideally ought to be, since the ‘optimal’ balance of enjoyment and ‘being there’ in friendship is never really clear to people or can easily shift with changes in people’s broader lives. This of course does not mean that all friendships are doomed to fall apart over mismatched expectations around emotional support, but it does mean that we can better understand friendship’s difficulties as produced not by individual missteps, but by competing directives of therapeutic culture that carry no straightforward rules for action in friendship.

Conclusion

Friendship remains distinct from other relational forms in its minimal connection to therapeutic institutions. It is rare for friends to seek counselling for their relationship, and while the self-help industry around friendship is growing (Franco, 2022; Levine, 2009), it is still not well developed. Nonetheless, therapy culture is more than its formalized aspects, as it can still shape meanings of friendship without expert interventions or a robust cultural industry of self-help. Indeed, therapy culture now permeates workplaces, politics and the state, education, and healthcare, and is thus part of contemporary culture well beyond the counselling professions (Illouz, 2008; Moskowitz, 2001). The presence of therapeutic ways of seeing relationships was so powerful, and appeared in all 20 interviews, that we think it is not possible to gain an adequate understanding of contemporary friendship without attention to its relation to the therapeutic. There is an increasing centrality of friendship in people’s lives and growing popular and professional discourse that says it matters for anything from mental or physical health, to success in the workplace, to the overall quality of people’s lives (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Franco, 2022: 7; Mallory et al., 2021; Sow and Friedman, 2021). In this sense, friendship now dovetails with broader cultural ideas about health, wellbeing, and success that are central to the therapeutic attitude, even as people’s practical uses of therapeutic styles in friendship might not always produce the results they are hoping for (Eramian and Mallory, 2021). To the extent that friendship is becoming an increasingly significant source of support in people’s lives, we can expect more people to turn to therapeutic resources to make sense of their friendships, especially when they perceive them to be fading or in trouble. Accordingly, we can expect to see growing contradictions between the increasing tendencies to rationalize and optimize friendship and the fundamentally informal character of the relationship as a core source of its appeal.

Our analysis shows that interviewees used therapeutic cultural resources to account both for what they value in friendship and what is troublesome about it. Strikingly, these could be one and the same. We have argued that, in friendship, the emotional revelations that therapeutic culture encourages can feel like both building intimacy and self-knowledge and like threats to personal wellbeing and happiness, as therapeutic directives equally caution people against relationships that drain one’s emotional energy or bring negativity to one’s life. Accordingly, we have shown one reason why modern friendship can be hard, as friends can easily interpret emotional disclosure in friendship in either of these two ways, or even both at the same time. Again, accounts of friendlessness provide incisive insights into this tension, as interviewees reflected on the intimacy they thought they were missing and the burdens from which they were spared as people with few or no friends.

Classic and mid-20th-century accounts of friendship did not define it as a reflexive object to optimize, but rather as what it allowed people to get away from, such as the role requirements of work, family, or the intensity of the ups and downs of romantic love (Jerrome, 1984; Simmel, 1971 [1910]; Suttles, 1970). Those accounts also characterized friendships as valuable in their own right, rather than an instrumental means to a better life or better self. To be clear, therapeutic culture does not replace these previous ideals of friendship as informal, private, pleasurable escape, but now exists alongside those longer-standing beliefs and practices. Indeed, this is why a number of our interviewees struggled with wanting their friendships to be both fun and pleasurable, and intimate, serious, and supportive. What our interviews show, then, is that the wide-reaching influence of the therapeutic attitude increasingly brings friendship into its reflexive practice such that it may offer less respite from the rational and instrumental qualities of other modern social relationships. Therapeutic styles do not necessarily end relationships, of course, and they can genuinely help people (Martinussen and Wetherell, 2021; McLeod and Wright, 2009). However, we can also ask if therapy culture does what it claims to do in friendship.

When people appeal to therapeutic principles in friendship, they are trying to build relationships that are ‘better,’ more intimate, more supportive, and in which friends can be their ‘best selves.’ And yet, as Illouz (2008: 149) notes, therapy culture can kill the very phenomenon it tries to save because it gives us ‘cultural techniques to standardize intimate relationships, to talk about them and manage them in a generalized way,’ which weakens closeness and the unmediated character of the relationship. Indeed, it is precisely because of these increasingly standardized ways of talking about relationships that readers might notice repetitiveness in the therapeutic ideas in our interview data. Illouz was writing about romantic love when she made this observation, not friendship, but the fact that her analysis now applies so easily to friendship suggests an enormous cultural shift in the expectations people have of it and the cultural resources they bring to bear on it. If friendship carries the burden of being a key source of emotional support, the path to self-knowledge, self-improvement, mental and physical health, as well as being an easy, fun, and pleasurable escape from the pressures of professional, familial, or romantic life, then this is a lot to put on friendship. Just as scholars have argued that romantic love and marriage have become increasingly loaded not just with traditional role expectations of coupledom, but also new expectations of intimacy, self-development, and mutual confiding (Coontz, 2005; Illouz, 2012), so expectations of friendship are also expanding in ways that might lead us to ask if we are asking too much of it. Our analysis shows that it is not that our interviewees have particular shortcomings that prevent them from forming rich friendships or that they are bad at using therapeutic resources to improve them. Rather, it shows that people are caught in the incompatible imperatives of therapy culture and their awkward alignment with old and new expectations of friendship, which raise new dilemmas around what a good friend or friendship is and what friends owe to each other.

To return to the puzzle we set up in the introduction about how friendship seems both at odds with therapeutic institutions and inseparable from therapeutic styles, our research offers at least one way of making sense of this seeming paradox. Therapy culture has been around in some form since the late 1800s, so why is it only recently relevant to friendship when it became relevant to so many other realms of life first? We suggest that therapeutic culture has so successfully permeated Euro-American culture and beyond, it can now thrive in the absence of experts or institutions. It no longer needs health or counselling professionals to direct its practices, use, or institutionalization. This is what makes the relationship between friendship and the therapeutic so interesting: rather than a formal therapist–patient industry emerging to remedy friendship that ordinary people then took up in their own lives, it was largely ordinary people driving the adaptation of therapeutic directives to friendship. What this shows is the power and flexibility of therapeutic cultural resources (Illouz, 2008) and how people can use them in sometimes surprising ways, which points to one of many reasons why it is increasingly difficult to parse out the differences between therapy culture and more general modern cultural forms.