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Abstract

This study examines how adults’ close friendships are lived using different temporalities. The modern ideal of friendship underlining individual choice and affinity is challenged by marriage and family. Using a temporal approach, I aim to grasp the variety of experiences of individuals during the early years of marriage. Drawing from qualitative interviews with 32 individuals forming 16 couples, I distinguished between three temporalities of friendship: (1) friendship here and now; (2) friendship in cyclical time; and (3) friendship based on the past and revived by timeless moments. I argue that, while some friendships entangle everyday family practices, other friendships are lived among two individuals, involving intimacy as outlined by Simmel, and simultaneously challenging the experience of linear time. This study contributes to an understanding of how friendships are lived within and beyond the family, and, furthermore, to a wider sociological discussion on the use of temporality in analysing social life.

Keywords

everyday life family friendship intimacy personal life practices relationality temporality time

Introduction

This article examines adults’ close friendships, specifically, how friendships are lived using different temporalities. Using qualitative interview data from 32 women and men from 16 couples, I examine how friendships are lived by individuals living within a specific setting, namely, the early years of a first heterosexual marriage, with or without children. My study empirically contributes to the discussion on friendship and personal relations, and, more generally, sociological discussions on temporality by showing how such concepts can serve as tools in understanding lived relationships. I do not use temporality to investigate relationship histories or individual relationship trajectories, but instead as a perspective from which people make sense of friendships in the present. A temporal perspective also allows for an understanding that friendships are not simply lived within the linear flow of time that characterises everyday life.

Although in everyday life a friendship is often considered a private relationship, sociological studies have highlighted the social character of friendship (Adams and Allan, 1998; Eve, 2002). In fact, two strands of sociological discussions concerning friendship frame this study. The first is an individualistically oriented view on personal relations in late modernity, highlighting the chosen bond between individuals and intimacy based on disclosure (Giddens, 1991; Jamieson, 1998). The second view underlines the social structure within which friendships emerge, from individuals’ family settings to wider societal contexts (Allan, 1998; Cronin, 2015a; Oliker, 1989). However, these two strands of discussion do not oppose one another; for instance, a relational perspective on personal relations takes into account both viewpoints (Jamieson et al., 2006; Mason, 2011; Smart, 2007).

Contemporary friendship is lived in ways that challenge a traditional understanding of family as the pivotal source of intimacy and care (e.g. Spencer and Pahl, 2006), although equality and reciprocity, the fundamental characteristics of friendship, have been claimed as differentiating friendship relations from family relations (Allan, 2008). Alternative ways of sharing intimacy and care have been examined specifically among people living outside a heterosexual couple (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004; Weeks et al., 2001). However, in an earlier study with the same couples as those included here, we (Luotonen and Castrén, 2018) found that spouses had, in all cases, divergent understandings of who belonged in their family. In addition to the spouse and children, most people included some members of their family of origin, their parents-in-law or their closest friend(s). Close relationships are thus lived and experienced in a variety of ways also among individuals living within a couple.

Recent studies have prompted discussions regarding how different dimensions of time shape the experiences of intimacy and belonging (Bennett, 2015; Cronin, 2015b; Gabb and Fink, 2015; Martinussen, 2019; Mason, 2018; May, 2016, 2018; Morgan, 2020). The evolution of personal relationships during an individual’s life course rarely follows a plan, but instead the embeddedness of time and spheres produces unexpected changes to trajectories. Imagining and anticipating future trajectories shape our understanding of the present (Bidart, 2013, 2019; Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). Drawing from the sociological conceptualisations of time and temporality, I outline three different temporalities of friendship in the results section here, arguing that temporality is of major importance in how people make sense of lived friendships. The daily life of urban professionals living with a spouse, especially if they are parents, can be characterised by a hectic rhythm set by work, commuting, the couple’s relationship and family life. Friendship relations are often organised around heterosexual partnerships (Ketokivi, 2012). Using the framework of temporal dimensions allows us to also capture those friendships that do not fit smoothly within the rhythm of daily life nor with a couple’s sociability, but that are nonetheless considered significant by individuals. However, a temporal perspective is not merely a methodological choice: it also contributes to our understanding of how friendships can be lived in ways that differ from the experience of linear time predominant in our thinking.

Previous research pointed out that friendship patterns are differentiated by gender (Blatterer, 2015; Bott, 1971 [1957]; Martinussen, 2019; Oliker, 1989). However, in Finland, couples can rely on extensive public services provided by the welfare state in order to balance family life, care and the paid employment of both parents (Anttonen, 2002; Hiilamo, 2004). Therefore, it is unlikely that the social networks of personal relations are based on practical needs or solely on gendered family roles and responsibilities. Instead, friendship relations are more likely founded upon individual aspirations, reflecting the modern ideal of friendship. Balancing friendships and family might require partly detaching oneself from family life (Castrén and Lonkila, 2004; Jurva, 2019).

This article analyses adults’ close friendships from individuals’ perspectives. Focusing on individual experiences and accounts of friendships is in line with the sociological idea of modern friendship, which cherishes individualistic views of closeness and intimacy. In addition, this article represents part of a wider study, whereby the making of these couples’ joint social networks upon marrying was reported elsewhere (Castrén and Maillochon, 2009; Maillochon and Castrén, 2011). However, I take into account the importance of the couple relationship and the nuclear family, considering them settings that ‘form the immediate environment of situated activity’ (Layder, 2006: 280). Marriage and the nuclear family bring together reproduced social relationships, positions and practices affecting how people act in the present, and individual ways of making sense of the world, which take place within this setting and the wider societal context (Layder, 2006: 272–282). Thus, I analyse how individuals’ friendships are lived and made sense of using different temporalities, both within the setting of marriage and the nuclear family as well as beyond it.

Intimacy and Temporality in Living Contemporary Friendships

In contemporary society, friendship is thought to be based on equality and reciprocity (Allan, 1998) and on having an intimate knowledge of the other (Jamieson, 1998). Wider societal processes influence the way friendship is understood at different times (Allan, 1998). The concept of modern friendship developed following the rise of individualism, entangled with the cultural idea of companionate marriage (Oliker, 1998). Moreover, the development of commercial society allowed friendships based on solidarity without instrumental aims to emerge (Silver, 1990).

In late modernity, flexibility allows people to shape their personal relationships. At the same time, there is also significant monitoring of how a relationship fulfils an individual’s needs (Allan, 2008). An influential conceptualisation of friendship in late modernity relies on Giddens’ (1991) idea of the pure relationship. People prefer dyadic relationships based on self-disclosure and intimacy instead of a larger collective. Intimate relationships, whether sexual, romantic or platonic friendships, are based on choosing between a variety of possibilities, and these relationships become an integral part of formulating the self. The relationship exists as long as both parties involved in the relationship are satisfied with it and wish to continue it (Giddens, 1991: 87–98). While the pure relationship might capture the ideal type of a ‘true’ friendship, even intimate friendships rarely match this ideal in real life (Jamieson, 1998).

Jamieson (1998: 8–9) states that, while a minimum of intimacy is a consequence of two people sharing detailed knowledge of each other and thus creating familiarity, our understanding of truly knowing the other means possessing privileged knowledge of the other’s inner self, a reality only possible for those loved and trusted. Although this disclosing type of intimacy is favoured in contemporary society, within the private lives of people, intimacy can take several forms (Jamieson, 1998: 13, 158–159), as revealed in empirical studies on friendship (Marks, 1998; Oliker, 1989).

According to Simmel (1950 [1908]), intimacy is based on an individual’s tendency towards considering the core of her/his existence to be what distinguishes her/him from others. Intimacy emerges when the ‘whole affective structure of the relation is based on what each of the two participants gives or shows only to the one other person and to nobody else’ (Simmel, 1950 [1908]: 126). That is, intimacy is not linked to the content of the relationship per se; instead, intimacy only emerges when exclusive self-disclosure becomes the axis of the relationship itself. For Simmel (1950 [1908]: 126–127, 138–141), intimacy exists fundamentally in the dyad, which he considers a unique structure. These different notions of intimacy underline the need to empirically examine how intimate friendships are lived.

In order to operationalise intimacy in friendships, I use Jamieson’s concept of practices of intimacy, based on Morgan’s (1996, 2020) concept of family practices, which shifted the focus from what families are to different activities – practices – through which people do family relations in everyday life. Building upon Morgan’s concept, Jamieson (2011) defines the practices of intimacy as practices that together generate and maintain a sense of closeness in a relationship. Among these practices lie, for instance, giving to, sharing with, spending time with, knowing, providing care to, feeling attachment to and expressing affection for another.

While Jamieson’s (1998) view of intimacy highlights the importance of linear time in accumulating familiarity and knowledge of the other, disruptions to the experience of linear time have also been noted as enhancing belonging and intimacy (Cronin, 2015b; Smart et al., 2012). Mason (2018) emphasises the significance of short encounters – that is, charged moments in which we experience an affinity or a connective force. The importance of moments has also been highlighted elsewhere, whereby ordinary moments shape a couple’s relationship (Gabb and Fink, 2015) or moments of difficulty test friendships (Rebughini, 2011). According to Mason (2018: 54, 117), affinity can be felt as a sudden, connecting energy existing beyond time, which also inhabits the past, present and future. The experience of linear time as well as disruptions to this experience provide a fruitful perspective on how close friendships are lived.

Zerubavel (2003) usefully theorises on experiencing time, the past specifically, noting that, while time as a mathematic entity is homogenous, our experience of it is not, since we attach both personal and social qualities to time influencing the way we view the past. In historical narratives, time is usually presented as going forward; however, time can also take the shape of circles, for instance, as a circle of a week or a year. In this way, the past is seen from a cyclical perspective, challenging the linear view of time. Despite the contrast, these two visions of time are compatible through what Zerubavel calls historical rhyming. Past and present are distinct although not entirely separate entities (Zerubavel, 2003: 23–27, 37). Contextualising Zerubavel’s thinking, a shared past, present and cyclical perspective on time can be seen in cycles of modern life with annual or weekly gatherings through which people can share a past and a future (Gillis, 2004). Memory and remembrance have thus become central to how we understand close personal relationships. According to Halbwachs (1992 [1941]; Misztal, 2003: 51–53), every group develops a memory of its own past by determining what ought to be remembered and how. Moreover, individuals’ memories are attached to a group’s collective memory, the latter encompassing the former. In the analysis here, I apply Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory, as well as Zerubavel’s notion of the experience of the past.

A multitude of environmental and internal rhythms coexist simultaneously within society, and human beings are involved in them, or rather, the rhythms are constitutional for humans (Adam, 1990). There are moments in which rhythms come together, clashing at other times (Tavory, 2018). Social life, involvement and commitment are defined and regulated by the dimension of time, and require coordination of rhythms (Zerubavel, 1981). Zerubavel (1981) distinguishes between private time and public time. The way that everyday life is socially and temporally organised involves the idea that at certain times we are available to others, but at other times we are entitled to be unavailable, and this time of unavailability is seen as private time. The two dimensions are not exclusive, but, instead, are hypothetical, forming a continuum, simultaneously present in an individual’s life and also subject to negotiation (Zerubavel, 1981: 141–144).

Friendships are lived and regulated not only by time but also by space. Domestic space, for example, is connected to proximity and increasing intimate knowledge of the other (Bowlby, 2011; Heinonen, 2021). Social accessibility and involvement are regulated through space and time, dimensions that are interwoven (Zerubavel, 1981). In fact, places, spaces, things and lives are entangled, and, therefore, personal relationships are embedded in multidimensional socio-atmospherics (Mason, 2018: 169). Ingold (2011: 63) states that living in the world is not about connections between or the entanglement of fixed points and objects, but rather the entangling itself: a meshwork of interwoven lines. Following Ingold’s thought, Mason (2018: 180) also suggests that we ought to focus more on the connecting than on what is connected.

I follow Mason’s (2018: 200) ‘invitation to think differently’ by being attuned to the multiple effects different temporalities exert on friendships. In order to understand how individuals’ close relationships are lived using different temporalities, I use Zerubavel’s theorising on time, including private/public time and historical rhyming; the concept of collective memory (Halbwachs, 1992 [1941]); the concept of rhythm (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013; Zerubavel, 1981); and, finally, Mason’s (2018) perspective on timeless, highly significant moments.

Data and Methods

The primary data consist of 32 research interviews with 16 women and 16 men, part of a wider longitudinal study on couples’ networks of personal relationships during the early years of marriage. In the first phase, 19 couples were interviewed prior to marriage.¹ Three to nine years later, 16 couples participated in a second phase of data collection, interviewed individually this time. In this article, I analyse the material collected during this second phase, in 2014 and 2015. In addition to the interviews, this article draws from a secondary dataset consisting of questionnaire data providing detailed information on couples’ social networks.

The semi-structured interviews were conducted in interviewees’ homes or on university premises,² and lasted one to two hours. The main topics discussed included everyday practices and sociability among friends, family, neighbours and colleagues; providing and receiving practical help and emotional support; and celebrating holidays. Following the interviews, a questionnaire was sent to the couples. Both spouses filled in information regarding the people in their network, including, for instance, the frequency of contact and the duration of relationships, and background information for each member in the network. The configurational perspective emphasises personal relationships as, on the one hand, personally lived and, on the other hand, as attached to one another as well as to time and place (Widmer et al., 2008). By using two different kinds of data, it is possible to grasp both inside and outside perspectives of lived personal relations (Castrén and Ketokivi, 2015). While this study focuses primarily on how friendships are lived and made sense of – an insider perspective – I also draw, when necessary, from the questionnaire data to capture a more detailed picture of the friendship relations discussed during the interviews.

The interviewees were 26 to 41 years old, and 14 of 16 couples lived in the Helsinki metropolitan area in Finland. All but two interviewees were white.³ All interviewees lived in Finland during their childhood, in most cases with both parents. The majority of interviewees had completed either a bachelor’s degree at the university of applied sciences or polytechnic institution or a master’s degree at the university or were still enrolled. In total, 24 interviewees were employed full-time and the remaining eight were either employed part-time, on family leave, unemployed, full-time students or other. They worked, for example, as an accountant, occupational health nurse, musician, family counsellor, project manager, managing director or researcher. In general, the interviewees appeared to have relatively solid economic and social resources. Moreover, from the perspective of the institutional setting of family life, the interviewees represent a rather homogenous group. Overall, 12 of 16 couples had children. While their couple relationships were six to 17 years old, the length of their marriage varied from three to nine years, and all but one couple had cohabitated prior to marriage. Nonetheless, I take into account the ordinary complexity of kinship (Mason and Tipper, 2008), namely, the variation in relationships beyond the interviewees’ ‘traditional’ family setting.

Employing an abductive analysis as outlined by Timmermans and Tavory (2012), I utilised theoretical discussions from the beginning of the research process. Specifically, instead of approaching the data with a specific theoretical framework, I tested the empirical findings in relation to theoretical discussions and concepts. I applied the methods for this, namely, revisiting the phenomenon, defamiliarisation and alternative casing. I conducted three rounds of coding, as suggested by Layder (1998), using the Atlas.ti software program. Working with transcribed interview data serves as the first step in defamiliarisation (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). In the first round, I coded various friendship practices – such as celebrating birthdays or lending tools – and associated information regarding a group of people and a place. The second round of coding, which itself entails revisiting the phenomenon studied, focused on the qualities of the friendship relations. I also elaborated on the first round by coding more abstract practices, such as sharing emotions, many of which I recognised as the practices of intimacy defined by Jamieson (2011).

When examining my codings within the larger context of individuals’ lives (see Brannen, 2013), the significance of temporality became obvious. I followed the idea of alternative casing (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012), conducting a third round of coding with a novel focus related to theoretical concepts concerning temporality. In the analytical process, this movement back and forth between individual accounts and generalised findings, and between empirical observations and theoretical discussions, ultimately generated the findings.

In what follows, I use pseudonyms for all of the interviewees’ names and the people they mentioned in order to preserve anonymity.

Friendship Here and Now

I identified three distinct ways in which interviewees used temporality in making sense of their lived friendships. In the first temporality of friendship, friendship relations were lived through spontaneous everyday practices, typically with neighbours with more or less similar life situations and who became close friends. In previous research, neighbour relations have been characterised by attempts to achieve a balance between reciprocity and a friendly distance (Crow et al., 2002), while also serving as a source of reciprocal help and assistance (Boyce, 2006). In Finland, neighbourhood ties are often weak ties characterised by social distance (Kouvo and Haverinen, 2017). Here, however, I focus specifically on neighbour relations described in terms of not only frequent interaction and reciprocity, but also close friendship.

Aija lives in an apartment building in a middle-class suburb of Helsinki, the capital city, with her husband and their toddler. The rhythm of her ordinary week is defined by work, commuting, picking up her son from daycare and spending evenings at home or at hobbies. Some of her neighbours have become significant friends to herself and her family, and they spend much time in the building’s communal courtyard. These families ‘lend anything from sugar to red wine or chairs’ and swap bookings in the apartment building’s communal sauna. Among her friends is a couple, Sari and Aku, who ‘create atmosphere; they organise New Year’s parties, Labour Day parties for families with kids, parties which are at their place. Almost all of the families from our neighbourhood gather there to celebrate.’ For Aija, this spontaneous and informal sociability has created close bonds lived in everyday life with ease. Instead of trying to reconcile different rhythms of life (see Tavory, 2018) by scheduling meetings with busy friends who live further away, she cherishes the spontaneity among friends in her immediate neighbourhood. Through one couple that ‘creates atmosphere’ within the neighbourhood, the friendships are entangled with the wider community, its people, the specific place and the rhythms of everyday life as well as parties that bring families together (see Kuurne and Gómez, 2019).

Leena lives with her husband and two small children in a house with a garden in a provincial town about 200 km from Helsinki. The couple moved to the area a few years earlier and Leena now lives geographically distant from most of her old friends. A close friendship has emerged between Leena, her husband and the family who lives in a house across the street. Leena described this friendship as follows:

We live in a house, so in the summertime especially we like to take turns cooking on different days and we spend a lot of time together, well actually in the winter, too. So it’s a bit like an extended family. [. . .] And also our kids are very attached to them, and for example if it’s someone’s birthday, [. . .] if we celebrate somehow on that real birthday, then it’s like grandparents and [the neighbours]. So, for us, they’re like . . . (Interviewer: So they’re there, okay’) . . . yeah, they’re a permanent fixture.

The two families also provide practical help, such as babysitting for each other’s children spontaneously. Similarly, other interviewees made sense of friendship relations in terms of their presence and availability vis-a-vis everyday life, informality and spontaneity. Interviewees mentioned sharing meals and other resources, sharing everyday events, helping each other out and being attached to one another – similar to practices of intimacy (Jamieson, 2011).

The friendship practices that interviewees described are connected to material, spatial and temporal dimensions (see Morgan, 2020). First, some of the central practices, such as sharing, lending, cooking, giving and receiving, are strongly linked to materiality. The reciprocal lending of objects can serve to reinforce intimate relations (Lewis, 2018; see also Holmes, 2019). It is important to note that such practices were carried out not because of practical or economic needs, since the interviewees were equipped with reasonable material resources, but instead voluntarily, resulting in increased familiarity and a sense of shared everyday life.

Second, the friendship practices are connected to the domestic sphere and to a specific neighbourhood: to homes, gardens and the communal courtyards of apartment buildings. Friendship practices are interwoven with family practices and expand interviewees’ domestic spaces (see Cronin, 2015a). However, when examining differences between genders, my results diverge from Cronin’s definition of gendered domestic friendships between mothers. In my data, both women and men considered these friendships significant, and entire nuclear families were typically involved in the friendships. The friendships, and the intimacy within them, were interwoven with a sense of connection to a specific neighbourhood, which applied equally to men and women.

Third, the temporal dimension emerges in the ways in which friendship practices are rooted in the everyday life here and now, taking place with little or no planning, such that they might feel self-evident or ‘natural’ (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). Through minor acts of coordination for the immediate future (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013), people get together (seemingly) spontaneously, spend time in the open air, cooking or just chatting together, thereby reinforcing the everyday flow of life within the immediate neighbourhood.

Within these friendships, there is no need for an opportunity to pursue dyadic intimacy, as proposed by Simmel. Instead, intimacy extends within and between families, such that friends can be described as ‘a sort of extended family’, to quote Leena. Finally, the division between private time and public time (Zerubavel, 1981: 143) remains flexible and fluid, since friendships are lived in the domestic and private sphere, here and now. Friendships are interwoven with everyday life and its spaces, places and material objects, all of which are entangled, forming what Mason (2018: 169) calls multidimensional socio-atmospherics.

Friendship in Cyclical Time

The second way in which friendships were lived emerging from the data analysis was through an explicit structure of friendship practices. Gatherings among friends were planned well in advance, repeated relatively unchanged time and again and, through time, became the way in which these friendships were primarily lived.

Miia and Aleksi, a couple in their 30s with two school-aged children, described in their individual interviews their friendship with a couple they met on their honeymoon. The two couples quickly developed a solid friendship that has lasted a decade, with both couples having children during this period of time. Despite living in different cities about two hours’ distance by car from one another, they quickly established the habit of spending midsummer and the New Year together, sleeping over at each other’s houses. As Aleksi stated, ‘We can’t imagine celebrating midsummer anywhere else.’

Apart from national holidays, some groups of friends created their own specific practices. For example, Jere, a 34-year-old father of one, has had a group of friends since childhood, whose practices he described as follows: ‘We live in different parts of Finland, but in practice it’s a weekend. I talk about “first-class trips”, heading to wherever, without spouses. [. . .] We are three men who travel together; we do cultural trips.’

A more complex set of established practices can be found in the accounts of Stiina and Janne, a couple in their late 30s and parents to a toddler. They have a group of friends who are all working professionals, married and parents to small children. Some became friends as fellow students about 15 years ago, and the friendship extended to include also the spouses and later the children. In the following interview quote, Janne described the practices of the group:

We used to be three couples and now we are three families, and considering our [busy] life, we keep in contact a lot. We celebrate birthdays and [. . .] we have a few traditions: a beginning of summer party in June, and then we have an Independence Day dinner.

In her interview, Stiina provided a more detailed account of how the Independence Day dinner is organised:

We gather in turns at each other’s houses, and usually the couple who is hosting prepares the main course, and the other two couples bring either the first course or the dessert. And it was the 14th time when we last celebrated Independence Day. We have agreed that it’s a party without kids, when we, the parents, get together.

This group of friends has thus created its own traditions that bring people together regularly, in a specifically defined and organised way. The acts of temporal coordination (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013) are rendered explicit by reconciling a multitude of rhythms across various families, coordinating calendars and organising babysitters in order to maintain the structure of practices.

These examples from the data show that practices among friends are planned and scheduled in advance, representing special occasions that disrupt the flow of everyday life (Gillis, 2004). Friendships can also involve entire nuclear families or couples. However, it is exactly because friendships are lived outside of everyday life that these practices can, in some cases, involve individuals escaping family life for a weekend. This is a distinctively different way of living friendships compared to friendships ‘here and now’, entangled in the everyday practices and domestic space presented in the previous section.

Traditions generate a collective memory of the friendship group, sometimes consolidated by the consistency of place (see Zerubavel, 2003: 41), as in the case of Miia’s and Aleksi’s midsummer celebration, which always takes place at a friends’ house, thereby rooting the tradition to a specific place. Friendships are lived through repeating practices, and simultaneously, sharing a past and a collective memory, which is created and cherished (see Halbwachs, 1992 [1941]). Furthermore, by anticipating the repetition of the traditions, memories of a shared past are used to plan and imagine future trajectories (see Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013).

These friendships are temporally organised in such a way that the established structures of friendship practices represent points where different rhythms of life come together, and through repetition a rhythm of its own emerges, situated within cyclical time (see Tavory, 2018; Zerubavel, 2003: 23). Friendships are lived both in linear time, such as being aware of how many times the tradition of Independence Day dinner has taken place, and, simultaneously, in cyclical time. Past and present can be distinguished, but they are not entirely separate, and the way that people manage the temporal dimension is similar to Zerubavel’s (2003: 25–26) historical rhyming.

Friendship Based on the Past and Revived by Timeless Moments

The third way of living friendships through temporality underlines a shared past among friends. Among interviewees, this shared past was often connected to a significant transition during life, such as beginning life outside the childhood home or becoming a parent. Some friendships were almost life-long, taking root during childhood. These friendships in almost all cases involved two people of the same gender, which is unsurprising since there is strong normative pressure against cross-gender intimate friendships (Blatterer, 2015: 172).

Otto lives in the metropolitan area of Helsinki with his wife, and describes his life as busy with a demanding job. His closest friendships were established with fellow students at the university of applied sciences 15 years earlier and maintained through the years. As he described:

When you got to know someone at college, and spent time and studied together it was pretty intense, so the trust in these people is still there somehow. You know them so well so maybe time can’t affect [the friendship]. [. . .] I think that when you get to know a person well enough, time doesn’t have an effect on the friendship.

In Otto’s account, the passage of time seemed to have a twofold effect on friendships. First, in the course of time, the friends acquired deep knowledge of each other and established trust, as well as creating shared memories. Those memories served to make sense of the friendship in the present (see May, 2017). Second, when Otto stated that ‘time doesn’t have an effect on the friendship’, he referred to a period of infrequent contact during which the friendship endured, thus becoming even more solid and valued.

When interviewees made sense of friendships through a shared past, the importance of material and spatial dimensions seemed to fade. A different kind of force operates here, as made clear by Miia, an accountant and mother of two, when she described her friendship with Silja who lives abroad:

Silja has always been kind of like a sister to me. We don’t keep in contact much at all, but when we see each other, I feel as if we were never apart. [. . .] We never phone each other or anything like that. Every time we see each other, I have this strange sensation that we were never apart even for a day. That’s how close she has always been to me.

Miia’s experience of a ‘strange sensation’ of not having been apart from Silja is a ‘trick of time’ (Mason, 2018: 191); that is, the experience is in temporal discordance with linear time, thereby reinforcing felt connection and belonging (see also May, 2016). Another example of a strongly experienced moment of encounter was described by Alvar, a musician and father. He began his account of Jani, a close friend who lives in another part of the country, by almost immediately describing how it feels to see him after a long period of time:

If I actually had a really serious problem and I had to tell someone, it would be Jani. He’s a colleague with whom I spent a lot of time when I was a student. [. . .] We are quite infrequently in contact, but he’s really important to me on an emotional level. When I see Jani after a long time, it brings a tear to my eye. It is really so good to see him.

Alvar’s experience of such encounters bringing a tear to his eye and Miia’s experience of the time apart fading away both provide powerful examples of sensations. They described moments that make the time passed apart disappear in an instant and revive the connection that has always ‘been there’ (see Mason, 2018: 115–116). Mason (2018: 192) states that moments can play a profound role in making affinities what they are. My data show that the moment of reunion is highly significant in how friendships are lived, imagined and recounted.

Friendships based on the past do not usually involve spouses or children. In these dyadic friendships, intimacy is similar to Simmel’s definition. The joy and fulfilment at the moment of reunion, as well as the experience of being beyond time, become central elements of the relationship, along with the shared past often known only by the other person. The exclusively shared content of the friendship thus becomes ‘the vehicle of the relation itself’ (Simmel, 1950 [1908]: 127). In Simmel’s thinking, a third element entering the dyad disrupts and disturbs the relationship between the two, such that the lack of interference gives the dyad its fundamental character. Although most interviewees do not explicitly talk about excluding their spouse or family from these friendships, from Simmel’s (1950 [1908]: 135–136; see also Pyyhtinen, 2009) perspective, it is precisely the continuous exclusion of the third party that secures the intimacy between the two original friends.

The interviewees make sense of friendships not only based on shared memories, but also on the expectation of continuity. Both past and future are entangled in the way friendships are lived in the present. Similar to May’s (2018) notion of spiral accounts of belonging and time, emphasising temporal folding and people’s growing awareness of how some friendships are expected to endure, the interviewees expect these friendships to ‘survive time’. In fact, imagining future encounters along with remembering the past are vital to how these friendships are lived.

Elaborating upon Mason’s (2018: 54) as well as Jamieson’s (2011) thinking, I argue that friendships can be lived extensively in individuals’ minds. This entails vividly remembering past encounters, moments in which intimacy and belonging were strongly felt, and imagining similar moments in the future, as well as the emotions and sensations they bring forth. Applying Zerubavel’s (2003: 26–27) concept of density in narratives about the past, these powerful moments and cherished memories of them can be seen as high points of density in a friendship. They make less dense times disappear in an instant, and keep the connection alive.

Discussion

This study aimed to analyse how individuals make sense of their lived friendships using different temporalities. The findings bring to the fore how multiple temporalities interact in the ways friendships are lived, either as entangled with family practices and everyday life or detached from them. In the analysis, I distinguished three temporalities of friendship – that is, ways in which temporality was employed within living intimate friendships. In the first, ‘friendship here and now’, friendship practices are interwoven with everyday family practices and the domestic sphere through material, spatial and temporal dimensions involving not just two individual friends but entire nuclear families. Following spontaneous and voluntary exchanges of joint practices, familiarity and intimacy emerge, and, as a consequence, friendships become a self-evident part of the temporal landscape (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013). The entangling of homes, gardens, children, spouses, friends, cooking, eating, chatting and encountering among others renders the distinction between private and public time fluid (see Zerubavel, 1981) and indicates how such friendships are lived within socio-atmospherics (see Mason, 2018).

In contrast to friendship here and now, ‘friendship in cyclical time’ is based on special and planned friendship practices, which through repetition evolve into a structure of practices, requiring coordination of various rhythms (see Tavory, 2018). A cyclical rhythm of its own emerges, becoming an integral part of friendships, entangling a shared past, the present and an imagined future, and providing an opportunity to regularly cherish the collective memory (see Halbwachs, 1992 [1941]). Friendships involve several individuals, couples or families, but in all cases they are lived within the structure of traditions beyond everyday life. Finally, the way in which these friendships are lived resembles historical rhyming; simultaneously within linear and cyclical time (see Zerubavel, 2003: 25–26).

The third temporality of friendship is based on the past and revived in moments that disrupt the experience of linear time. Within these long-standing, dyadic friendships, intimacy is similar to Simmel’s definition: a shared past and a strong sensation at the moment of an encounter, as well as excluding a third party, become integral parts of the friendship. Moreover, friendships are lived in people’s minds by thinking about, remembering and imagining emotionally charged moments of reunions that bring to life a potent connection (see Mason, 2018: 193). I argue that remembering and imagining become vital practices in these friendships.

Revisiting the ideal of modern friendship, consisting of a disclosing type of intimacy between individuals, and as a freely chosen bond, noticeable differences emerge between the three distinct temporalities of friendship. In ‘friendship here and now’, and to some extent in ‘friendship in cyclical time’, the friendships involve not only two or more original friends but couples or entire nuclear families, demonstrating that friendships are relational, connected to a social network, time and space. However, the third temporality of ‘friendship based on the past and revived by timeless moments’ is organised differently from the other two temporalities, representing instead a dyadic bond based on disclosure, similar to the modern ideal of friendship. It is more individualistic vis-a-vis, first, the kind of intimacy within friendships, and second, the way the past and memories are used. To be precise, a Simmelian type of dyadic intimacy is cherished by excluding possible distractions from the dyad formed by the two friends. Additionally, whereas ‘friendship here and now’ and ‘friendship in cyclical time’ rely on collectively lived practices and jointly visiting the collective past, in ‘friendship based on the past’ meaningful moments are cherished privately, in the minds of individuals rather than collectively shared.

Finally, the results presented here demonstrate that friendships are lived in ways that bring to the fore individual variation. I argue that, by using different temporalities, people can strive for the kinds of friendships they prefer, and hold on to friendships that might otherwise be lost when family life reorganises the broader configuration of relations. This study adds to an understanding of how friendships are lived in relation to temporality, and additionally, to the settings of marriage and family. Furthermore, it contributes to sociological thought on temporality by bringing to light how concepts such as past, present, future and rhythm can enhance our understanding of lived experiences of everyday life and personal relationships.

Footnotes

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article: this research has been funded by Kone Foundation.

ORCID iD

Aino Luotonen

Aino Luotonen is preparing her PhD in Sociology at the University of Helsinki. Her study focuses on lived friendship and sibling relations as well as understandings of family during the early years of marriage. Her research interests include everyday life,intimacy,belonging and temporality.

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