Friendship, Intimacy, and the Contradictions of Therapy Culture.

While therapy culture has long been a part of the repertoires through which people think about and practice their romantic relationships, it has been less prominent in how they envision friendship. However, based on our interviews on experiences of friendlessness in an Atlantic Canadian city, we show that therapeutic styles increasingly shape how people orient to friendship, even as friends rarely seek formal therapy to manage their conflicts. This article focuses on how modern therapy culture, with its emphasis on individual wellbeing, self-knowledge, and 'healthy' rather than 'toxic' relationships, presents people with conflicting cultural imperatives for how to practice their friendships.

Friendlessness and loneliness: Cultural frames for making sense of disconnection.

This article is based on 21 interviews in an Atlantic Canadian city with people who identified as having few or no friends. With all the talk of a modern loneliness epidemic, we might easily assume friendless people are lonely, yet here we take an interpretive approach to analyze how they alternately claim to experience and not experience loneliness. We argue that claims to loneliness or its absence are never merely personal stories or problems of individual health or wellbeing, but are shaped by larger cultural resources and meanings.