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Sexuality & Culture (2013) 17:8399 DOI 10.1007/s12119-012-9140-7
ORIGINAL PAPER
Monica Karlsen Bente Tren
Published online: 1 June 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract Friends with benets (FWB) is dened as friends having sexual relations without commitment or romantic feeling towards each other. The purpose of this study was to explore the FWB phenomenon among young adults from a Norwegian, heterosexual perspective. Using the underlying theory of sexual scripts, and phenomenology as a research method, semi-structural interviews were conducted with twelve heterosexual women, aged 2128 years, with experience in FWB relationships. Various elements of the relationship were explored: motives and function, denition of an FWB relationship, emotions, intimacy, and social inuences. Results revealed that the main function of the FWB relationship appears to be the fullment of physical need in a safe context. Furthermore, the majority of subjects did not explicitly dene the relationship, or have explicit rules to regulate it. Three types of FWB relationships emerged: the good friends, the lovers, and those who are on the hook. The study showed that people in FWB relationships borrow elements from friendship scripts and love scripts, and combine them to form an FWB script. In the public sphere, behaviour is guided solely by this friendship script. It is only in the private sphere that the love script is present in addition to the friendship script.
Keywords Friends with benets Sexual scripts Young adults Norway
Introduction
Friends with benets (FWB) can be dened as friends having sexual relations, without any feelings of commitment or romance towards each other. Thus, an FWB
M. Karlsen B. Tren (&)
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Troms, 9037 Troms, Norwaye-mail: [email protected]
Identifying friends with benets Scripts Among Young Adults in the Norwegian Cultural Context
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relationship ts neither the traditional denition of a friendship, nor the denition of a romantic, committed relationship (Bisson and Levine 2009). An FWB relationship appears to be more a hybrid of the two, which makes it an interesting phenomenon to study.
In the early stages of research on sex between friends, the focus was on sexual attraction in cross-sex friendships (Bleske and Buss 2000; Kaplan and Keys 1997; Sapadin 1988). The concept of FWB was initially used by...