Interpersonal Communication- A Mindful Approach to Relationships, 2020a

and that the opposite-sex friends are just “kidding themselves.” Another possible problem for romantic
relationships is that the significant other becomes jealous of the opposite-sex friend because they believe
that, as the significant other, they should be fulfilling any role an opposite-sex friend is.
Scouts are Changing with the Times
Opportunity Structure
The final challenge described by O’Meara was not part of the original four but was described in a
subsequent article. 52 This question is primarily focused on how individuals find opportunities to develop
opposite-sex friendships. A lot of our social lives are divided into females and males. Girls go to Girl
Scouts and Boys to Boy Scouts. Girls play volleyball and softball while boys play football and baseball.
Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t girls who play football or boys who play volleyball, but most of
these sports are still highly sex-segregated. As such, when we’re growing up, we are more likely to spend
social time with the same-sex. Ultimately, it’s not impossible for opposite-sex relationships to develop, but
our society is not structured for these to happen naturally in many ways.
Postmodern Friendships
In the previous section, we looked at some of the basic issues of same-sex and opposite-sex friendships;
however, a great deal of this line of thinking has been biased by heteronormative patterns of
understanding. 53 The noted absence of LGBTQIA+ individuals from a lot of the friendship literature is
nothing new. 54 We have needed newer theoretical lenses to help us break free of some of these historical
understandings of friendship. “Growing out of poststructuralism, feminism, and gay and lesbian studies,
queer theory has been favored by those scholars for whom the heteronormative aspects of everyday
life are troubling, in how they condition and govern the possibilities for individuals to build meaningful
identities and selves.” 55 By taking a purely heteronormative stance at understanding friendships,
friendship scholars built a field around basic assumptions about gender and the nature of gender. 56
Friendship scholar Michael Monsour asked a group of friendship scholars about the definition of
“friendship” and found there was little to no consensus. How then, Monsour argues, can researchers
be clear in their attempts to define “gender” and “sex” when analyzing same-sex or opposite sex
friendships? 57 As part of his discussion questioning the nature of gender and sex and they have been used
by friendship scholars, Monsour provided the following questions for us to consider:
• What does it mean to state that two individuals are in a same-sex or opposite sex friendship and/or
that they are of the same or opposite sex from one another?
• What decision rules are invoked when deciding whether a particular friendship is one or the
other?
• Why must the friendship be one or the other?
• If friendship scholars and researchers believe that all friendships are either same–sex or opposite–
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