Development of Friendship

A concept I found interesting this week was the set of stages of the development of friendship. The little diagram the book included was very helpful for remembering the stages. I can relate each stage to a friendship I had in high school. Our role-limited interaction began when we accidentally met through other friends. I became best friends with two girls, and these two girls were a part of a five girl group of friends that had known each other since elementary school. As a result, those two girls brought me to hang out with their group, and I met this one girl, let’s call her T. As I hung out with that group, we moved to step two, friendly relations, trying to see if we could develop a better friendship. T and I began moving towards friendship by hanging out outside of the group, or talking in the hallways and at lunch. We began to consider each other friends, and moved to step four, or nascent friendship. We stabilized our friendship by creating rules and establishing trust. We hung out a lot one-on-one outside of school too. A few years later, however, our friendship began to wane. She had very different ideas and opinions that severely clashed with mine, and she did not allow us to have differing personalities. There was a time where all communication was extremely defensive- and now it doesn’t exist at all.