Like many Americans, the writer Rhaina Cohen is shopping for a home. Unlike many Americans, she’s searching for a house to live in with her friends and their families, a unique setup that sometimes raises eyebrows. One recent interaction with her realtor crystalized the disparate attitudes many people hold toward friendship versus romantic relationships.
After she explained that the home would be occupied by a group of friends, the realtor told Cohen that whenever he attempts to hang out with his own friends, they question whether he really loves his wife and kids. As if by spending time with friends, he must be denouncing his family.
“It was really interesting to see him observe this different model than what my friends and I were trying to create, which did not pit marriage and a nuclear family against friendship, but saw them as compatible,” says Cohen, the author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center.
We live in a culture that often places paramount importance on romantic relationships, sometimes at the cost of friendships. Entire genres of movies and books feature love interests as the driving narrative that lead to a happy ending or offer advice on how to land a romantic partner. Dating apps are plentiful, while similar platforms for friendship are lacking.
Another study concluded that when people enter into romantic relationships, they lose two close friendships.
This societally enforced dichotomy has real-life effects: One study found that living with a partner pushes friends away. Another concluded that when people enter into romantic relationships, they lose two close friendships. More and more, the roles of spouse and best friend are merging into one person who is expected to fulfill both platonic and romantic duties. But research shows people who have non-romantic best friends report greater feelings of social support compared to those whose spouses are their best friends.
Cohen’s reporting, as well as her own experiences, highlights friendships so deep that, by some standards, they could be considered as intimate as marriage. In the past, these relationships wouldn’t be controversial or unique, but in today’s romance-first culture, platonic and romantic love can seem at odds. But they don’t have to be.
Friendship wasn’t always secondary to love
Just as the roles of romantic partners have evolved over time, so have the roles of friends. Renaissance-era men lived alongside and with their friends and spoke lovingly about them in ways we only associate with romantic partners today. By the 1800s, men were photographed arm-in-arm, holding hands, sitting on each other’s laps; women wrote passionately to their friends, using terms like “Dearest darling,” or “my beloved.” Marriage, meanwhile, was an economic institution meant to shore up property, resources, and family labor.
The scales started to shift in favor of romantic partners as marriage took on more significance, Cohen says. Women began to enter education and work environments in the 1920s, and came into greater contact with men. As a result, the institution of dating as we know it was born. Dating, inevitably, took time away from friendship. Marriage got a lot more romantic and spouses, in turn, came to depend on their partner for emotional support.
At the same time, shifting cultural norms around sexuality weaponized affection between same-sex friends. The labels of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” emerged around the turn of the 20th century, Cohen says, and passionate love for friends was inherently sexualized and stigmatized.
A hierarchy of connection
These days, Cohen says, “we place unnecessary limits on friendship,” because society sees platonic bonds as second-best. There are systemic reasons for this hierarchy — friends have few legal protections compared to the rights of spouses. Culturally, living a good life for many means getting married and having children.
Marriage has taken on even more significance in recent years, given the expectation that your partner will also be your best friend. Many think that a spouse or romantic partner should fulfill all of their emotional needs. In reality, having close friends is better for your mental health long-term than a romantic relationship. A supportive partner should also encourage connections outside the relationship.
It’s not uncommon to experience a sense of loss when a close friend marries.
Having your romantic partner also be your best friend, co-parent, roommate, and sole confidant is a lot of pressure. They become the default plus-one to all events, the implied person with whom you spend weekends and vacations. “If you want your partner to be your partner and your best friend and fulfill all of these roles, that takes a lot of time and energy and resources,” says Jaimie Arona Krems, an associate professor of psychology and the director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research.
With all that time dedicated to romance, friendships suffer. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to devote to platonic relationships if all of your time is dedicated to a romantic one. Those who retreat into coupledom may find themselves with far fewer friends on the other side.
Many people are aware of this shift and can become territorial when a friend starts dating someone new. It’s not uncommon to experience a sense of loss when a close friend marries. For uncoupled friends, being the only single one is alienating enough. It’s difficult to feel like you play second fiddle to your friend’s romantic partner, too.
Feelings of jealousy or sadness shouldn’t be cause for shame, Krems says. “People readily admit that they feel jealous when somebody is interested in their partner, or they think that their partner is interested in someone else,” she says, “but they much less readily admit it amongst friends.” Not only is jealousy common in these situations, Krems says, but it’s provoked when you suspect you might be replaced, whether by a romantic partner or another friend.
When friendships feel threatened, you might engage in what Krems calls “friend guarding” behaviors, which don’t necessarily need to be negative (like undermining your friend’s relationship). In fact, this jealousy can motivate people to be more intentional with their friends, Krems found in a study. If you suspect you’re becoming one of the casualties of a friend’s new relationship, there’s time to act and get a hangout on the calendar. “Jealousy can be a signal to us that we value this person,” Krems says. “We want to be intentional about maintaining them in [our] lives.”
Prioritizing both love and friendship
There is a world in which we see the people in our lives as individuals with distinct but equal roles. For instance, if a friend is under the weather, don’t make the assumption that their partner should be the only person to care for them, Cohen says. Not only does showing up for your friends deepen your relationship, but extra support removes some of the pressure on partners to be solely responsible for their spouse.
We can also reimagine free time as something worth spending not just with family and other couples but friends, too. “In the limited vacation time that people in the US have,” Cohen says, “it is okay to spend some of that vacation time not with your spouse, not with a romantic partner.” Invite a pal on a family trip, throw a party for both single and partnered guests, join an adult dodgeball team with work friends.
If you feel yourself getting jealous over a friend’s divided attention, take it as a cue that they matter to you. You might need to be the one who frequently initiates plans, but that’s friendship. It takes effort and is not always perfectly balanced — but it’s worth it.
A friend-focused life requires rethinking your identity not as a unit of “we” but as a vital component of a myriad of relationships, and adjusting your expectations accordingly. Maybe Saturday is date night and Wednesday you cook dinner with your closest friends, and one Thursday a month is for book club. Sometimes your partner’s needs will supersede a friend’s. Other times the opposite might be true. Everyone gets their time in the spotlight. No one is second place.
