“How do you feel about horror movies?”
I copied and pasted the message to the coolest women I was connected with on Tinder, putting myself out there in a surprising way: I wasn’t trying to go on several Halloween-themed dates this past fall. No. I was trying to make friends—because that’s equally, if not more, important to me as feeling fulfilled romantically.
We live in a culture that has a complicated relationship with the idea of friendship. On one hand, having the social skills in childhood and adolescence to surround yourself with peer affection is encouraged. On the other hand, we’re expected to drop these connections in young adulthood and redirect our focus to the more “serious” endeavor of finding a romantic partner and settling down to start a family.
This Valentine’s Day, I’m reflecting on how our culture’s hyper-focus on romantic love comes at a cost: the deprioritization of friendship.
Many folks in adulthood bemoan the difficulty of making friends. Maybe this is unsurprising, given the headlines screaming that Millennials and Gen Z are getting married and having children later, if at all. Generationally, we’re de-centering the importance of traditional timelines around “settling down.” But we still need community. The problem is, we don’t have a blueprint for how to center friendship because we’ve been taught to value or prioritize friends less than our partners.
Let me explain.
The hyperfocus on romantic love as the be all, end all of adult happiness is wrapped up in the nuclear family: the idea that we leave our families of origin to start new units, made up–ideally–of a husband, wife, and a spattering of biological children. And this endeavor isn’t just celebrated socially, it is even rewarded by the government (think: tax breaks for married couples).
One doesn’t have to be a full-on relationship anarchist to unsubscribe to the idea that our romantic lives are the most important to our overall interpersonal…
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