Why do people treat friendships and relationships as two different things?
Inspired by this post and many thoughts I had about the topic previously.
For some reason, a lot of people treat friendships and romantic relationships as two entirely separate things. People say stuff like "I could never date a friend" or "I want to date them but they just want to be friends". The top comment by @BeanBurrito on the post I linked mentions how men want to become friends with women simply because they have too little confidence to just ask them out.
I've never understood this. To me, being a friend and dating are just two points on the same closeness spectrum. You go from acquaintances to friends, then best friends, then partners. You can obviously skip some of those steps sometimes, but those are still the same thing - being in a romantic relationship is the same as being very close friends, it's just an even closer form of it. Yes, there's usually an extra factor of exclusivity in a relationship - but they can be non exclusive, so it's not a defining trait.
Asking someone out shortly after meeting them is such a wild concept to me. You probably wouldn't meet someone and immediately just go "hey, let's be best friends", so why would you ask them if they would be even more?
I also don't really get why people care about being "friendzoned", for the same reason. Like ok, you won't be the "bestest closest friends" with someone, but you can still be good friends? If they agree, you can still have personal conversations, or cuddle, or do whatever else that you can do in a relationship. I get why people can be upset if a person they like shows absolutely no attention towards them, but why would you be upset at them just wanting to be friends?
It it literally just about sex and physical attraction? But then also, things like "friends with benefits" exist. So clearly, you don't have to be in a relationship in order to do that. And if that's the only thing you actually need, why would you ask someone "let's date" instead of just directly saying what you want?
I don't get it.
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.
Ok, yes, I understand what you're saying. But also, there are different kinds of friends. There are some friends who you can discuss your problems with. With some, they're just a good person to laugh and have fun. Every friendship you have is different, and there are different characteristics defining them. I see romance as just another type of that.
That would still answer all of your questions. People who say "I could never date a friend" mean "I could never date any other kind of friend than the primarily romantic kind". People who say "I want to date them but they just want to be friends" mean "they want to be a different type of friends than that".
If you go through your original post, all of those questions are answered by "they want to be a different type of friends than that".
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.
aside about marriage and Christianity
I don't want to get too bogged down in Christian definitions of marriage. Just to make my position clear, there are lots of things not to like about Christian marriage norms: complementarian/patriarchal gender roles, ignoring spousal abuse in the interest of avoiding divorce, the hypocrisy of a high divorce rate alongside the rejection of gay marriage. That is definitely the place we were in when we got engaged, so it is important to my story. For me, the central idea that marriage / having a partner / whatever you want to call it is commitment holds up pretty well despite its origin, rather than because of it.
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.
--
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.
This is a lovely metaphor. Thank you for sharing it!
Laying these out side-by-side like this really emphasizes to me how wild it is that there's no widely socially accepted role in between these. I guess that's why I didn't find a poly relationship too hard to transition to, though.
Huh~~
What does the in between look like? How would a trio of more than best friends handle say, one of them receiving promotion to a different city? Same Q different trio: one of them having aging parents who need in home full time care? Same Q different trio: one of them becoming wildly more wealthy than the other two?
It depends. When you can have multiple partners your lifetime or long-term commitments will look different with each partner, and not all partners are involved with all other partners. People have different philosophies - they function as solo entities, they want everyone in the various relationships to talk things out around the kitchen table, they have a nesting partner (who they live or buy a home with) or a primary partner and secondary partners.
Those things are all navigated individually. It's not like being monogamous means you only have one choice of whose family to go to for the holidays, or only one parent in need of in home care, especially when divorces are involved. Kids and parenting adds a whole other aspect.
I don't currently have More than one partner but I'm open to it. And that does mean that the mutual flirtation that I may have with a friend is an open offer with zero pressure or demand behind it. For me, I'd be open to a sexual relationship with most of my friends if they were interested.
My current situation leaves me with little energy and too much depression to effectively date others and I'm tired of "polytraining" people, but my current relationship is not built around an expectation of monogamy above all else
Hmmm very interesting....I guess mentally I've always assume the nesting aspect is horse and carriage with a partnership but I guess that's not necessarily so. Ditto kids and parents. Is it then any different from "just" regular dating of other people then? Or maybe it's one of those it'll look different every time with every person kind of thing.
For yourself, do you miss dating other people because of your current situation? Do you have some negative feelings that you're rendered temporarily functionally monogamous due to circumstances? Please forgive and ignore if that's out of bounds for me, obviously you have no obligation to teach me anything or speak on behalf of anything.
Looks different. An ex of mine is raising kids both their own and their partners', living together, functionally all married to each other. Others have a marriage and hookups or kink partners or whatever, and each has different priorities. Others are very egalitarian. I don't have kids, my partner's parents are dead, and I just have a mom left. My partner's kid is an adult and I love him and he calls me step mom but like, I didn't raise him, just gave him a safe healthy place to stay to visit his dad.
Mostly no, because I'm not dating anyone else because I'm so exhausted I can barely keep myself functional while caring for my partner and working. I don't have the time and energy, emotional or physical, to invest in someone else, and I'm too tired to want it much. Sometimes I get touch starved and I wish I had someone around who could take care of me for once (something that current partner and I have found ways to make work but when he's sick hes got much less to give. He's making me a simple dinner tonight though for example) But it's my choice based on my inability to handle dating.
I'm too tired to be. And too disconnected from my previous support system (which included the flirty friends, and some of the queer meetups) post COVID and now post paraplegia. Partner worries I'll leave him due to the caretaker stress, lots of caretaker partners do that, usually men statistically, but I won't and thats some of his shit to work through in therapy. If I wanted to date, I could. If I resented anything it'd be not having enough energy to care, but I dont have the energy to resent it either. Idk if thats the healthiest place to live, frankly, but we're only not married due to medical insurance reasons, so this is sort of part of that whole in sickness and in health thing. I could absolutely feel this way about another person too, but I have responsibility with current partner that would also risk that person feeling neglected and that isnt fair to them either.
No worries, I don't mind sharing
That really broadens my horizon on lovely human relationships. And maybe there doesn't need to be clear lines between lovers friends family and just....people who care for one another through health and illness in this life and any other.
Your situation sounds really difficult, and I'm sure it has its own ups and downs. I hope you will continue to find lots of surprising sources of strength :) to keep being who you want to be and keep loving whoever you love
I would say pretty much all of these would vary case-by-case depending on the specific desires and needs of the individuals involved, but in the most committed circumstance, they'd be handled the same way as they would in a two-person partnership. More difficult in some ways bc there's an extra person, but honestly not that much harder depending on how everyone's priorities align.
My wife and I are hoping to help my metamour move internationally so we can live together, and that's when things get tricky -- when the law gets involved and only views an exclusive partnership of two people as valid.
Oh yeah our world basically has everything set up as a couple I guess..... Hotels assume two, immigration assumes marriage.... It would be really dumb if it'll take you guys getting divorced on paper and marrying the third to make it work :/ meanwhile assets and taxes and healthcare etc all be a royal mess.
Employee health benefits assume only one partner huh, that would be a big one immediately I can think about
Luckily we're planning on living places where the healthcare issue is less dire, but yeah, getting things working immigration-wise is gonna be non-trivial. Still optimistic though!
You guys will get through it! I guess that's one great thing about poly, more smart people putting their heads together to resolve a common goal
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 :)