Why do people treat friendships and relationships as two different things?

I see it as more of a venn diagram than a single line from "friend" to "partner". There's the things that make someone a good friend, and then there is a circle for sex, but there's also a third one for "you maybe want to build a life together". Plus there's some inexplicable pixie dust that we call romance, and that can show up in a 10 year friendship or on a first date or a first conversation or never.

You can be maxed out on the friendship zone, but not have anything in the other two circles. My best friend and I have had sex in the past and we didn't hate it, but we could never build a life together. The things we want are too different. She hates animals and I need to have pets. She has weird family stuff that she handles that I could never put up with as part of that family. I have like, no ambition and that would annoy her to no end. We've also just never had that spark of romance in 18 years of knowing each other. I don't want to build a life with her and I've never wanted to just lay in bed together with my head on her chest listening to her heartbeat and the rain. But she's still my best friend, aside from my husband.

Because yeah, friendship is important in a relationship. I've never been just friends with my husband, but he is my best friend. We built our friendship and our relationship at the same time, but we've always had that spark of romance to set it apart, and when we were old enough for the idea of building a life together to be more than a distant hypothetical, we fit right into it.

It just feels completely different to me.

To complicate this further, these are hugely individual experiences that vary wildly from person to person. You might not feel that way. Maybe you're young and haven't experienced the shades and flavors of closeness you can have with other people, or maybe you and I are just wired differently. Maybe you're demisexual or aromantic. I can't tell you about why you feel that way about relationships, but I can tell you that for other people, friendships and relationships do feel different, even though there's a lot of overlap.

After I proposed to my (now) wife, our pastor gave us a book to read called As For Me And My House by Walt Wangerin. The central idea I took away from the book is that marriage is not defined by love, but by commitment. This was a pretty radical idea to 27 year old me who was "in love" and thinking about something longer term, but having little idea what it meant or would mean. Thirteen years in, I still think it's a good definition of marriage.

I think the idea of commitment is closely aligned with @GenuinelyCrooked 's "build a life together" circle. All people change: their direction in life changes, their needs change. I think the core of commitment in a marriage is to grow together, which must to be done with intention so that you don't grow apart.

Friendships, on the other hand, don't have the same level of commitment. One might have a very good friend that they would do anything for, and vice versa, and I don't mean to minimize the importance of that. But those relationships are defined by common interest, history, or fellow feeling, not that central promise that tomorrow will be like today. They might move across the country or get busy with their kids or jump onto a completely different political bandwagon and want nothing to do with you. Any of those things would be a loss, but the definition of friendship doesn't preclude them the way the idea of spouse or partner does.

This is not to say, of course, that marriages don't end. But even that is done in a more formalized way than the end of friendships. Even if you set aside the legal aspects of marriage and divorce, there is a moment where you "break up", where you intentionally end the commitment.

I feel like it might be a slightly unfair reading of @BeanBurrito's comment, I think they're just talking about the case in which someone sought a relationship but it didn't work out, not necessarily assuming this is all cases.

In any case, as a woman, this a mind virus: just knowing that this is the motivating factor for befriending women for some men makes you question the intent of all men. And this is also unfair for men for whom it's not the case...

In simplest terms, for me, borrowing aspects from @GenuinelyCrooked's idea of a three part Venn diagram, and @first-must-burn's excellent description of a "traditional Christian marriage":

A friend is someone I want to hang out with but can't live with long term.

A partner is someone with whom I've made an exclusive commitment to live with forever.

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If new things come up that makes it hard to live with them, I will tear through heaven and earth to make it so that we can then live together happily again. And my partner has also made that same commitment to do so for me. (Poly folks insert more people but I would imagine the premise of living happily together as trios / quads / etc applies?)

If my friend gets a jumpy Malamute or buys a ranch full of dinosaurs, that's cool, my friend can put em behind an electric fence or whatever while we're hanging out at their place. If my friend up and moves to a place with a climate I can't stand, that's cool, I can still vacation there and stay indoors during the visit. In all of the friendship cases, I don't expect my friend's lifestyle to change for me, nor will I change mine to suit them. My friend can vote for [party I dislike] and that (by itself) is probably fine. My friend can dictate that their house be filled with free ranged spiders and that's okay because we'll hang at my place.

All of those would be deal breakers in a marriage, for me. And so in a marriage, we would have to compromise: the spiders must be inside terrainiums, but maybe we'll buy a house with an independent entry basement full of spider tanks; the dinosaurs are no go, sorry, but we'll live on a large enough acreage that we can have geese. Etc.

Two friends can each live their most insane lives unrestricted by what the other one needs. Worst case scenario we can meet at a neutral location. Friendship can also survive minimal contact for a long long time: it's not ideal but as long as the points of commonalty haven't substantially changed we'll go right back to it when we talk again.

Maybe it's like oil/water vs pink salt / water samples blended together: sometimes the friendship oil/water mixture can look very much intertwined, but over time it'll re-settle into seperate entities ready to be shaken up again. For pink salt and water: the salt loses some colour and the water takes on a bit. ( To seperate, you could technically evaporate and seperate out the salt, but it wont be pink anymore and the water's mineral content will have changed a bit as well permanently.)

I think demisexual people do not date/romance/have sex with folks who aren't already good friends, so it would look a little bit like that single line spectrum. But even in that case, even exclusivity aside, there are many wonderful friendships that can go thus far and no further - eg house full of free range spiders, total financial illiteracy, incompatibility with regards to polyamory etc. I could be fantastic friends with all these folks but I wouldn't be able to contemplate a romantic relationship with them.

Edit: forgot finances. Yes. Big one. I can be friends with a billionaire without being one myself, but if my partner wins a $50m jackpot you bet your bottom dollar I'm in on that with them.

I think I understand what you're getting at. If we look at it, all relationships exist on a spectrum. From some random guy I pass on the street, to an acquaintance, to a friend, to a best friend, to a partner, and everything in between. What divides them are varying levels of vulnerability, responsibility, romanticism, formality, knowing, etc. Viewed through your prism there is nothing that really separates anyone except for degrees of the above but I think for most people that is too reductive.

We're humans and we like to put labels on things and even though those labels are often imperfect fits they stick because they get enough of the point across to be useful. It's generally accepted that a person owes a friend certain things that they do not owe an acquaintance and culturally we can pretty accurately assume what level of things we would ascribe to different degrees of relationships. For romantic relationships we are generally talking about the highest degrees of vulnerability and responsibility while some other things may depend on the relationship, for example you may know a best friend more than your partner or have certain quirks and inside jokes/knowledge that go deeper than even your own romantic connection.

But why then would some people say they never would date a friend? Because social relations exist on a spectrum but that is not necessarily a flow chart. For the most part, I would never date a single friend because I don't have the romantic or sexual attraction enough to want things to be any more than friends and romantic and sexual attraction are huge parts of partnerships that to me make the two forms entirely distinct and then to go from just dating to an actual partnership you have to add in being able to be vulnerable and take on responsibilities in some form for the person and not everyone even passes that "test."

Most of the time if there is mutual romantic/sexual attraction with an acquaintance you try for a relationship and it either fails or succeeds on its own merits. I've had the rare casual relationship turn into friendships when it was clear we weren't compatible for a relationship and the opposite happens too, when friends realize or just have the opportunity to turn things in a romantic direction. We should never speak in absolutes but I think that most people have general reasons why people are just friends and outside of circumstances we don't really see enough transformations of close friends to relationships for people to readily consider it (note I said close friends).

I see that to you it's a wild concept for people to head in a romantic direction shortly after meeting but that's the reality of how most people who are actively looking for relationships handle things. The entire dating app and places for single people ecosystems exist predicated on the fact that most people looking for romance are looking to exactly do that with someone who is not a friend, likely because for most people friends are either not romantically available or there's no interest there. The majority of partnerships today still form from friends of friends or acquaintances but again, even in those scenarios people are intentionally trying to progress from one end of the spectrum directly to the other.

I guess it's difficult to explain why people treat friendships and relationships as two different things other than to say that for the vast majority of people they certainly are very distinct things

I'm in queer circles where polyamory is widespread, and I've sometimes had anxieties when people would talk about their polycule. I've seen a person on social media explicitly say that they were delighted to get the impression from attending pride that the entire queer community of their city seemed to be a big polycule. I've also seen somebody use the connections they had in their polycule as a way to unjustly shield themselves from criticism. As an asexual person who hasn't dated for more than a decade and has no immediate desire to do so, these experiences had me worried for a future where I couldn't have meaningful friendships within my queer community that had my back through the upcoming challenges of life.

I've done work to alleviate these fears in the past years. I've made new friendships and have taken a more active role to create the kinds of communities that I would feel at home in. I've organized meetups, invited new friends over for my first birthday party in approximately 20 years, I try to help people by sharing my experiences and explaining in which direction I'm steering my life. When I asked one time "what do you mean by STD?" (not being able to recall the abbreviation immediately in the moment) I got the answer "don't worry about it, fam, it's something you'll never get" and I felt seen and at home.

I've come to realize that not everybody has worked on their competence to give meaning to friendships deliberately in the way I chose to do in the past years. When my buddy of 30 years got a new girlfriend, he told me he had confusing and uncomfortable discussions with her about that he'd have such a close female friend as me. A lot of people who haven't allowed themselves to think about their friendships a whole lot aren't equipped with the vocabulary they can use to describe them.

You sometimes get the impression that people are losing the ability to hold many friendships alive, and it's not just my impression, it's something that I've seen echoed by other people - like this video by Rowan Ellis about the "catch-up friendship crisis". Don't let the video title of "female loneliness" fool you. Ellis talks a lot about gendered experiences of loneliness that also addresses male loneliness as well. While thinking about these gendered ways we experience relationships is part of Ellis's job description, I'm less keen to divide humanity in two boxes for every topic we're looking at, because a lot of the problems we're facing are the same ones. A focal point of the video is the concept of a catch-up friendship, i.e. a friendship where you meet so irregularly that you spend all the time you have together to "catch up" on the latest news in life and have no way to form other new experiences of doing stuff together. And the video also mentions solutions that are very close to my heart: If you're not offered the experiences you want to have, take a more active role. Create the friendships you want to have, create the communities you want to be a part of.

I've heard my fair share of murmurs about people who are unable to hold close friendships with anybody other than romantic partners, and as a single person this has filled me with anxieties in the past. Now I see that that is a "them" problem, not a "me" problem. I cannot force other people to have a look in the mirror and take a more active role to work on their ability to hold close connections. But I can do my part to create the friendships that I want to have.

Rather than a linear spectrum it's more of a weighted directed graph (which is probably representable as a graph). More descriptively I think of it as a tree. The trunk of the tree is friendship but there are sorts of branches into physical attraction, commitment, romance, and an ability to move between branches.

Some people's relationship branches start higher and lower than others. Some people have friendship trees that are harder to climb than others. Some trees have branches easier to cross between than others.

I've had relations of different types. My friends-with-benefits friendships didn't really last beyond the physical attraction phase. Not for any bad blood, but sometimes it's just physical and when the novelty wears off it's easier to go separate ways. On the other hand I have a friend who has had that relationship with two others in our friend group and they've all maintained lasting friendships beyond that phase. I think people know their boundaries and if someone is "protecting a friendship" they probably have experiences backing up that decision.

Edit: Just another thought. My partner and I started off physical the first day we met. it continued that way, but I intentionally held off on making it something official just because I had too many relationships burn hot and fast. I wanted to try something different. Eventually I was comfortable that it wasn't going to be a short thing and we labeled the relationships. It was frustrating for her but I think in the long run it made us stronger.

Umm relationships for me are deeper intimate more emotional bonds. Friendships have a more shallow feel to them?. Think 100m deep relationships. Friendships 50m. Close friendships 75m. Best buds 85m. Well thats how i see it :)