From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, women relate to other women based on the theory that the first true identification we develop is with a female. Given this theory, women relate to one another by maintaining close interpersonal emotional bonds. Even when a close relationship (friendship) becomes threatened, these bonds are most likely to remain intact; of course, much still depends on the women involved, and the former statement is variant upon individual nature, and the stages of friendship itself. It is offered as a generality based on a psychoanalytic orientation in research on interpersonal communication.
We will examine the relative degrees of friendship, or intimacy, in an actual dyadic relationship, in this case, one involving two women, one a lesbian and the other, a heterosexual. Because a dyadic relationship is generally regarded as a sociologically significant relationship between two individuals, traditionally a man and a wife, we will look at two women sharing the intimacies of close friendship with some expectation that dissonance may result because of their differing sexual orientations.
The intimate feelings that women share with one another may lead them to form closer, more intimate relationships with one another than they share with men (Rubin 141). In view of interpersonal research, such a fact is not surprising, given that men have more difficulty with the expression of shared feelings than do women. Shreve uses a discussion between two women, both wives and mothers, to illustrate the gap between men and women when it comes to communicating. There is even less time for mothers to communicate with one another. One woman confides in the author:
We've all heard all the usual statistics about how men are unable to communicate, but somehow we felt that wasn't all of it. There was something else. We were exploring this issue, and I felt we were really on the brink of something, when one of the ...