Best Friends and Marriage: Exchange among Women

Mandell, Nancy; Oliker, Stacey J.

doi:10.2307/352948

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Contemporary Western culture lacks a defined category for platonic same-gender infatuations, yet they continue to occur and have been most frequently documented between women (Diamond, 2000a;Rothblum, 1993;Von Sydow, 1995). Oliker (1989) noted that many contemporary women describe the beginning of a same-gender best friendship with regard to "excitement, heightened energies, frequent thought about the other, invigorated selfregard-in short, in terms of the ardent sensibilities of romantic love" (p. 5). Similarly, Rubin (1985) directly likened new best friendships among some women to "new loves" (p. 113), noting that the two women often become obsessively intertwined.…”

Section: Evidence For the Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

What does sexual orientation orient? A biobehavioral model distinguishing romantic love and sexual desire.

Diamond¹

2003

Psychological Review

445

320

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Although it is typically presumed that heterosexual individuals only fall in love with other-gender partners and gay-lesbian individuals only fall in love with same-gender partners, this is not always so. The author develops a biobehavioral model of love and desire to explain why. The model specifies that (a) the evolved processes underlying sexual desire and affectional bonding are functionally independent; (b) the processes underlying affectional bonding are not intrinsically oriented toward other-gender or same-gender partners: (c) the biobehavioral links between love and desire are bidirectional, particularly among women. These claims are supported by social-psychological, historical, and cross-cultural research on human love and sexuality as well as by evidence regarding the evolved biobehavioral mechanisms underlying mammalian mating and social bonding.

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