For Rawlins, ‘Friendship Matters’

Early in the fall semester, the phone rang in Bill Rawlins’ Purdue University office. On the other end was Hillary Rosenthal, a producer for CBS This Morning. The weekday news and features program was doing a week-long series on intimacy, and one segment was going to focus on cross-sex friendships. In researching the series, Rawlins’ name kept turning up, particularly in conjunction with his 1992 book, Friendship Matters: Communication, Dialectics, and the Life Course (New York: Aldine De Gruyter). Would Rawlins be interested in doing a "pre-interview" on his work, with the possibility of being featured later when the segment was filmed? Rawlins said yes.

What was it about Rawlins’ work that attracted a CBS producer to him? Probably because it provided interesting insights into an appealing topic. Friendship Matters was the culmination of what Rawlins called "a dozen years of sustained inquiry regarding friendship" and, as such, covered a broad scope of friendship types. But, this book was also very specifically a work of communication scholarship, with Rawlins drawing his conclusions from listening to people talk about their friendships and by listening to friends talking with each other.

In particular, the book contained two case studies of cross-sex friendships. One concerned two young adults who had been friends since adolescence. The other concerned several kinds of friendships among older adults. With both the younger and older adults, Rawlins noted, issues of romantic attraction had to be negotiated early in the relationship, and those issues kept reappearing, particularly in the younger pair. A number of the older men, in fact, claimed that they had no close friends other than their wives.

For Rawlins, difficulties in negotiating romantic elements out of cross-sex friendships are not well enough acknowledged. "We have Valentine’s Day to celebrate romances, but we ought to have a friendship day, because our friendships are just as important and just as difficult to construct as are our romances," he asserted. "If men and women can’t be friends we’re ruling out half of humanity."

In any case, a short pre-interview turned into a 45-minute conversation. By the end, Rosenthal was talking about arrangements for sending out a camera crew.

Rosenthal gave Rawlins a choice of where to be interviewed: at home, in his office, on campus. Rawlins chose to be interviewed by the fountain in the courtyard of Purdue’s Liberal Arts building, where the communication department is housed. He also asked for the camera crew to film inside his classroom where he was teaching an upper division course on interpersonal relationships. For Rawlins, this segment was at least as important as the portion where he was talking about his theories and his research findings, because he has realized that his research has led from "teaching about friendship to teaching as friendship."

"Our research makes the classroom vital, but our conversation with students makes the research meaningful," insisted Rawlins, who has won awards for both his teaching and his research.

That day, class members were focused on how public and private relationships differ and how our notions of private relationships have evolved. Rawlins and his students were examining Ancient Grecian city-states to see how the idea that all citizens were public citizens evolved into having public and private personas and thus forming relationships based on those personas. For example, cross-sex friendships may work very well in private, but in public there is always some expectation of potential romantic involvement. In his case study of the younger pair, for example, the male was told by others that he really ought to consider the female as a romantic partner after he had gone through a string of romances that didn’t work out.

The segment featuring Rawlins aired on September 24, 1997. In the end, Rawlins had mixed feelings about it. The material from the camera crew that went to Purdue included only parts of the interview with Rawlins; the interaction between Rawlins and his students was left out. Moreover, Rawlins had pointed out in the interview that the film When Harry Met Sally was a particularly bad example of cross-sex friendship, as the relationship was "rigged" by the writers to fit the form of a conventional romantic comedy. And yet, the CBS This Morning segment used clips from When Harry Met Sally interspersed with comments from Rawlins.

In the end, however, Rawlins felt that the opportunity was worthwhile. He was able to expose some significant communication theory and research to a very large audience, and, all in all, he felt that his ideas were represented fairly in the segment. Of course, once he’s been an "expert" for the national media, his name will crop up in database searches conducted by other reporters. Watch for Bill Rawlins’ name and face, because you’re likely to see them again.