'Just' Friends

“Let's just be friends.”

“I can’t believe I got friend-zoned.”

“Do you like them or like them like them?”

“You seem too close to just be friends.”

All these phrases are symptoms of the problem I'll be waxing on about today: why is friendship a 'just'? Why is platonic love devalued as less than instead of simply different from romantic love? Why is it framed so often as a stepping stone to something ’more’ instead of being seen and celebrated as its own reward?

I have on a few occasions in my life (and thankfully only a few) been approached by someone who was interested in me. I always find this very awkward, mostly because I have to watch them struggle to express themselves and then turn them down as tactfully but at the same time explicitly as possible. This is awkward. You don't want to beat them to the punch and assume you know they're into you 'like that'. I've done this before and not only do you feel conceited doing it, it's fruitless because the person in question always denies that this is their intention. They more often will respond with something like: ‘I just want to be friends.’

Here's the thing: Ten times out of ten, I don't want to be friends. Even if that's really 'all' they want, I like to develop my friendships naturally. I'm an introvert and prefer to keep a small circle of very close friends. My friendship slots are limited and I can't offer them to you as a consolation prize to save you from embarrassment or worse, waste my time when you never wanted friendship in the first place.

However, so many people do offer friendship as some sort of euphemism for a let-down that outright saying no to it comes off as even more bitchy. “Sorry, I don’t like you that way, and I also don’t want to be your friend!”

We see examples of this hierarchy in fiction too. When, in a story, one friend develops feelings for another and the resulting tension makes them ultimately split ways, I feel like most of the sympathy from readers/watchers is always for the person who was rejected. And while I feel sympathy for them too, I also feel just as bad if not more so for the other person, the one who just lost a friend through no doing of their own.

In another fictional instance, when a platonic bond is written beautifully and poignantly, people clamor to ‘ship’ the two people together. I see a lot of the best, strongest friendships in literature be turned into secretive steamy romances in fan fiction. Of course, fan fiction is a wild free-for-all and I don't begrudge anybody their fun, but the phenomenon does make me wonder again about the way people look at and devalue friendship. Is it possible to like somebody ‘too much' to be 'only' their friend? This is the language we use, and though I get where its coming from, but it creates the illusion that friendship is merely the first rung on a ladder.

The touting of romantic love as the top of some human experience hierarchy is also completely blind and omissive to those of us who don't experience it. As an aromantic asexual, I can't count the number of times I've heard things like 'you're missing out' or 'but romantic love is the biggest thing that makes us human!' I and others like me have been subjected to the idea by society as a whole that we’re ‘broken’ or lacking some essential human quality because we don’t experience desire for romantic or sexual relationships. The monopoly that romance seems to have on the word 'love' means that we must be incapable of it because we don't feel it like that. The message is certainly strong enough to make a lot of people like me grow up thinking there is something wrong with us- when we don't develop crushes like the other kids. Or when our friends mean more to us than we do to them because the ‘friend zone’ is the holiest zone we have.

At large, as many adults age and start families, a shocking number of them lose touch with their long-time friends and/or never prioritize making new ones. This is highly normalized, but arguably harmful. In a world where we're all in our own bubbles already with the convenience of technology, I think this lack of understanding the benefit of friendship for mental health and the neglect/ failure to nurture existing meaningful platonic relationships is a huge part of the loneliness epidemic we face as we age. It also probably results in people putting too much pressure on their romantic partner to be ‘everything’ for them, which is a heavy burden to hold for any one person.

True friendship is a beautiful, enduring thing. Some of my best friends and I can go years without speaking and then meet together in a restaurant and pick up right where we left off, the time falling away like so much refuse/like nothing. The sheer enjoyment of another's company without expecting anything in return but the same. Friendships can be just as beautiful as relationships (and they can be just as toxic as well!) They're simply...different, like comparing apples to oranges as the saying goes, and yet we do it all the time, as if instead we’re comparing oranges to more orangey oranges. And it’s annoying, man.