Applying Stages of Friendship Analysis

Applying Stages of Friendship Analysis to My Life

Since my graduation from high school, I have maintained friendships with former high school classmates that, in particular, illustrate the factors that contribute to the waning stage of friendship. More specifically, the two friendships are a study in contrasts that strongly suggests the much greater relative importance of communications content than of communications frequency.

The Evolution and Development of Friendship

Both friendships started out very similarly in the formative stages (i.e. role-limited interactions, friendly relations, move toward friendship, nascent friendship, and stabilized friendship). We were high school classmates who played on some of the same sports teams and shared many other friends in common. Because our schedules and our situations in high school were so similar, I went through the same initial stages of role-limitation, friendly relations, and the move toward friendship with both of them. We had the same classes and, as freshmen, we were the only ones to make the same varsity sports team. Since we were treated differently by some of the upper classmen, that adversity was something we shared that contributed to the development of our friendship. During the stabilization stage of our friendships, we often shared information about ourselves and about others in confidence and we developed a sense of trust substantially because of the way we respected one another's confidential disclosures. My friendship continued with both of them throughout the four years of high school and we all stayed in touch after we all left for different colleges after our graduation. However, my friendship with one friend is much closer today than my friendship with the other, mainly because of the qualitative difference in the nature of the conversational content of our respective communications.

The Waning of One Friendship

During the first semester of our freshman year at college, we all spoke on the phone fairly regularly and we took turns visiting one another's campuses before the Christmas break. Since then, we have gradually reduced our frequency of conversation and we eventually settled into a pattern of talking only a few times a year. All of us have established various close relationships with significant others while at school, but two of us noticed a pattern with our third friend that has changed the relative quality of our friendship and that has greatly contributed to the waning of our friendship with the third friend.