Unclear endings: difficult friendships and the limits of the therapeutic ethic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social scientists typically treat friendship as a positive part of people’s lives, but what happens when friendships fall apart, often with little explanation? Based on interviews in an Atlantic Canadian city, this article focuses on two key themes in people’s experiences of disappointing friendships: first, unintelligibility with regard to why friends exited their lives; and second, people’s interpretations of failed friendships as personal failures. We argue that, even as friendship pain feels personal, we must also understand it through friendship’s inherent qualities of institutional openness and informality and through the limits of the cultural resources of therapeutic communication that people may bring to their friendships. As we show, therapeutic directives to ‘communicate openly’ in personal life sit uncomfortably against friendship’s openness and informality. The article contributes to the critical friendship literature by attending to how the inherent structural and cultural contradictions of friendship shape people’s shared experiences of friendship pain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".