“Is the friendship worth keeping:” Gender differences in communicating forgiveness in friendships

Abstract

Although forgiveness plays an integral role in friendship maintenance, interpersonal communication scholarship has largely overlooked how transgressions and forgiveness are negotiated between friends. This study focuses on gender differences to develop a typology of relational transgressions in friendships. Two hundred and thirty survey respondents (116 women and 114 men) described relational transgressions in their friendships, the perceived severity of these transgressions, and strategies used to communicate forgiveness. A combination of MANCOVA and inductive analyses reveals gender differences. While male transgressions typically involve encroaching on other intimate relationships and theft, female transgressions emphasize disclosing personal communication beyond the friendship’s boundaries. Conflicts between male friends could escalate from verbal to physical aggression, whereas female friends were likely to sabotage other close relationships that threatened the friendship. Finally, males preferred to communicate forgiveness using the minimizing strategy, while female friends generally favored the discussion and conditional forgiveness strategies. Overall, the perceived severity of a transgression was positively related to use of the discussion and conditional forgiveness strategies, and negatively related to the minimizing strategy. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• Forgiveness strategies
• Relational transgressions
• Friendship
• Gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The cutoff for sufficient prominence /emphasis varies depending on the size of a given dataset. For this dataset, 5 repetitions corresponded to approximately 4–5% of all given words within open-ended responses within a given response category.

2. Percentages reflect the frequency of that term within all gender-segregated responses to each open-ended prompt.