What If Love Is Just Friendship That Lasts?

In adulthood, one of the first and most difficult lessons I have had to accept is that friendships eventually drift apart. It happens undeniably, and it hurts. I have been through it. The ending is never sudden. It is slow, almost painful in its pace. It usually starts with the joy of the first spark. In the beginning, there is that thrill of discovery, the getting-to-know-each-other stage. You share bits of yourself, details of your present life, hoping they will resonate. What kind of music do you like? Have you listened to this artist? It reminded me of you. There are daily conversations about the most ordinary things. A random Facebook post. A TikTok. A loud argument on Twitter. Have you heard about that actor? Let’s buy matching jackets. Let’s visit that café sometime.

That spark grows until it shapes into something real, something you can finally name. If you opened your mouth wide enough, you could say it: friends.

But after a while, it shrinks. The desire to share fades. The updates stop. The time between meetings stretches further and further, like the slow drip of a faucet that finally runs dry.

And then you are left with this strange, solid thing that feels like it could fall apart at any moment, dissolving back into the nothing it came from. When it breaks, you break too.

Look into a fire long enough and you realize how foolish humans are for believing we are solid. We are made of nothing stable. Atoms colliding and separating. Here now, gone the next second. We think we are whole, but we are really only fragments. Ghosts moving through the world. Dust waiting to scatter. Light that flickers and disappears.

— How It Feels to Float, Helena Fox

I have always thought of myself as too attached to friends, though I do not always show it. It comes from a fear that they will leave me behind. Maybe my clinginess is only the result of grieving the end before it even arrives. Maybe it is me holding too tightly to what I know will not last.

For some reason, I always imagined having a college friend group that was so close we would do everything together, no matter what it was. Studying in the library, going out for lunch, running errands, spending time in every café on campus until we knew the best spots and the best coffee. Even saying hi to the cashier who would know us by name.

I partly blame all the sports anime I have watched over the years. It is why I always cry during the third-year graduation scenes. I wanted the kind of community teams like Seidou, Karasuno, and Seirin created, where people supported each other through hard times, where they knew one another so deeply they would always choose to stay together. I once read an article about the epidemic of loneliness, which said that friendships are built on continuous, unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. In Diamond no Ace, the team lives together every day, their struggles and triumphs binding them. Their openness connects them. It is a friendship, at least in fiction, that never breaks. It feels perfect. What captures baseball better than trust and chance?

I do not have a sport, so I will never know that kind of friendship. And now at twenty-two, I realise I will not know a bond that close either. Everyone around me is living different lives. People are moving ahead without me, working through their struggles with those they keep closest.

Maybe it says something about me that I have such good friends, people who know me well, and still I grieve the “what if” friendships. The ones where you do everything together. The ones so full you run out of new things to try.

Some would probably say this is my longing for romance.

I remember a conversation from four years ago, when I admitted to my friends that I could not understand the difference between romantic and platonic love.

“I do not think romantic feelings really exist. Love exists, yes, but maybe romance itself is not its own thing. Maybe it is just the butterflies you feel when you get close to someone you desperately want as a friend. Then the honeymoon stage ends, and what is left is simply the friendship holding everything together. Doesn’t that mean romance is just platonic love, only called by another name?

If you take away intimacy, if you remove the sexual part, then what is it that makes you say you like someone romantically? Is it just how much you value them as a person? And if that is the case, isn’t it still friendship, only deeper?”

Maybe it is because I have never been in a relationship, but with so many of my friends I want to do everything. I want to go out to restaurants. I want to tell them about the tiniest things. I want to hug them and never let go. And when I find a group I love, I feel no need to search for anyone else. In my head, we are already complete. You know me. I know you. That is enough.

But the flaw is obvious. Not everyone thinks of friendship the way I do. For many people, it is not rare. It is something you can find again, in different ways, with different people. There are endless forms of friendship, endless levels, and you can never be sure if someone else feels the same way you do.

That same article on loneliness explained that as we age, it becomes harder to hold onto strong friendships. People grow up, they become busier, they spend more time with family. Eventually, they form relationships and you are left behind, only because you thought: we were complete. I know you. You know me. I liked it the way it was.

For them, it was never complete. They keep searching for more, for something rarer, something stronger. And then you are left wondering whether you will ever find the kind of companionship you have always longed for.