Friends

By Lisa Gee

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0747570167
• ISBN13: 9780747570165
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 1 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.6" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Raises the value of Platonic friendships

This book is one of the few exploring the topic of intimate, but non-romantic, cross-gender relationships, a.k.a. the Platonic friendship. I picked it up expecting a collection of case studies based on interviews with contemporary couples. It has that, and to my pleasant purprise, has much much more to offer. The content is well researched, and Lisa Gee has made sure to reference not only up to date social psychology, but also includes a wide range of historical and literary examples which the author cites as evidence that the cross-gender friendship had been a normal and widely accepted social arrangement in previous generations. Through interviews with sibling and non-sibling cross-gender couples, Lisa Gee pieces together the components of a successful non-romantic friendship that endures the pressures of modern Western society. Initially it was surprising that brother-sister pairings had been included in her investigation, however they form a key argument that contemporary culture has over-sexualised the male-female relationships and the author argues from the first chapter that this was not always the case in the past and should not be in the present or future. One weakness is the lack of structure to the ideas presented. The text is arranged into seven chapters within which subsection headings are lacking, so it was difficult at times to follow the authors line of argument as she switches between historical, literary, and non-Western cultural references interspersed with excerpts of interviews. The book is mainly a presentation of case studies both past and present, real and fictional, so is not readily usable as a self-help guide to nurturing such a relationship in one's own circle of friends. However, publicising the benefits of non-romatic cross-gender relationships is a laudable goal that certainly needs more contributions from other authors, publishers and popular psychologists.