Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

the nature of our original interactions.
When one enters into the nascent stage of friendship, the friends are no longer interacting within their
original roles, and their interactions do not follow the stereotypes associated with those roles. Eventually,
we start to develop norms for how we communicate with this other person that are beyond those original
roles and stereotypes. Ultimately, this stage is all about developing those norms. We develop norms for
what we talk about, when we talk, and how we talk. Maybe Adilah makes it very clear that she doesn’t
want to talk about politics or religion, and we’re perfectly OK with that. Maybe we keep the bulk of our
interaction before and after class, or we start having lunch together before class or coffee after class.
The norms will differ from friendship to friendship, but these norms allow us to set parameters on the
relationship in this early stage. These norms are also important because keeping them demonstrates that
we can be trusted. And when we show we can be trusted over time, the level of intimacy we can develop
within our relationship also increases.
It’s also during this period that others start to see you more and more as a pair of friends, and
external forces may begin to impact the development of your friendship as well. In our case, maybe
Adilah has a sister who also goes to the school, so she starts hanging out with both of you from time to
time. Maybe we have a significant other, and he/she/they start hanging out as well. Even though we may
have these distractions, we must keep faithful to the original friendship. For example, if we start spending
more time with Adilah’s sister than Adilah, then we aren’t faithful to the original friendship. Eventually,
the friendship crystalizes, and others start to see the two friends as a pair. One of our coauthors had
a friend in graduate school, and it was very common for people to ask the friend when our coauthor
couldn’t be found or ask the coauthor when the friend couldn’t be found. Friends in the nascent state are
seen increasingly as a “duo.”
Ultimately nascent friendships evolve into stabilized friendships through time and refinement. It’s not
like one day you wake up and go, “My friendship has stabilized!” It’s much more gradual than that. We
get to the point where our developed norms and interaction patterns for the friendship are functioning
optimally for both parties, and the friendship is working smoothly. In nascent friendships, the focus is
on the duo and developing the friendship. In stabilization, we often bring in new friends. For example,
if we had found out that Adilah had coffee with another person from our class during the nascent stage
of friendship, we may have felt a bit hurt or jealous of this outsider intruding on our growing friendship.
As stabilized friends, we realize that Adilah having coffee with someone else isn’t going to impact the
strength of the relationship we already have. If anything, maybe Adilah will find other friends to grow
the friendship circle. However, like any relationship, both parties still must make an effort to make the
friendship work. We need to reaffirm our friendships, spend time with our friends, and maintain that
balance of equity we discussed earlier in this chapter.
Rawlins also notes that friendships in the stabilized stage can represent three different basic patterns:
active, dormant, and commemorative. 33 are ones where there is a negotiated sense
of mutual accessibility and availability for both parties in the friendship. “share
either a valued history or a sufficient amount of sustained contact to anticipate or remain eligible for a
resumption of the friendship at any time.” 34 These friends may not be ones we interact with every day,
but they are still very much alive and could take on new meaning and grow back into an active friendship
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