Following the framework of distant reading, this project aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of gendered social relationships in American literature (1880-2000). While multiple studies in the distant reading paradigm have investigated conceptual associations of male and female characters in American fiction, this project is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to focus explicitly on how gendered characters interact, that is, the concrete narrative actions exchanged between characters of different genders. To do this, the project builds on software developed by the author that allows for the automatic extraction of semantic motifs associated with entities in textual data. Substantively, the project focuses on two main research questions. First, it aims to clarify whether relationships have become more symmetric over the 20th century in terms of their action content, and if so, whether this trend has been a linear one. Second, it aims to conduct a fine-grained analysis into the evolution of the semantics of gendered relationships by identifying and tracing distinct relationship frames such as friendship, courtship and love, or parenting.