We do a thing in the society I live in where we elevate our romantic relationships above all other connections. Sometimes that’s a good thing, for example: if your lame-ass family full of bigots sees your love connection as lesser because of some difference in race, creed, class, gender or sexual orientation. Indeed, fuck them. But more often than not, we elevate our romantic connections above all others out of a misguided sense of obligation informed by toxic aspects of monogamous culture known as amatonormativity.

Oh, we can pause here, yes . . . I can explain what I mean by that: monogamous culture is not inherently toxic, the same way masculinity is not inherently toxic, but I don’t think there’s any effective counterpoint to my assertion that aspects of these things are indeed bullshit. 

For those of us who’ve been socialized as feminine in the Western version of the gender binary, the concept of a very intertwined platonic relationship is not likely a foreign one. I have a friend that I truly consider a platonic life-partner. This is not hard for most folks who know us to understand, but it did raise some eyebrows when I would tell people how my former spouse used to willingly sleep on the couch when she’d come to visit from out of town, because he knew my relationship with her was not inherently lesser than my relationship with him. But then, this was a man who never struggled to tell other men he loved them, either. 

If you were socialized as masculine, emotionally intimate friendships may not have been as normalized for you, (in fact, they may have been outright discouraged . . .), and that’s terrible. I’ve been fortunate to have multiple close non-romantic friendships with masculine folks, but I also know that what we have is not their norm for friendships. Our society falls short here, big time. As a result of suppressed vulnerability being a hallmark of masculinity, and the human tendency to prioritize relationships in which we can be fully ourselves, the romantic relationships of masculine folks end up being elevated by default because platonic ones don’t often meet the same needs.

One of the biggest struggles I see crop up for folks in unlearning mononormativity, is the idea that one’s personal value is determined by how much your romantic partner needs you. I have absolutely struggled with this myself, even in the having of multiple partners. If they didn’t *need* me, how would I know they *loved* me? If I didn’t need them, what was the point? 

To be needed is to feel secure in the idea that your position in someone’s life is more certain, but to know that you’re wanted is, in my experience, a far more secure experience because what we desire is generally more attractive than what we require. Please let me be someone’s coveted chocolate mint ice cream over their fiber supplement!

That’s all easy to say, of course – but it’s really taken me a lot of practicing what I preach. If I go back to my first ever blog entry, Meant To Be, I very much wrote what I needed to hear. My partners are with me because they want to be. Taking that a step further, my partners are not important to me because I need them, they’re important to me for a countless variety of reasons, as are my friends and connections of varying labels.

And let’s just talk about labels – why do we need them to determine the designated level of importance of each relationship? I used to joke that the five most important people in my life were my spouse, my BFF, and my three kids – but not necessarily in that order. These days, I think of my life and connections more in terms of a radial chart than a prescriptive hierarchy of labels. I have platonic life-mates, comets, romantic life-partners, distant sexual connections, beloved friends I see every few years, family, metas, school chums, colleagues, co-leaders in community, and innumerable combinations of these descriptors. They all ebb and flow like a constellation in which some celestial bodies orbit much further away than others, while some are akin to permanent moons. I don’t prioritize time with one over another based on a checklist of roles they play in my life . . . I mean, can you imagine?

Jo gets 3pts for sex, 5pts for romance, 7pts for relationship duration for a total of 15pts, which means I prioritize them over Sam who gets 6pts for shared bank accounts, 3pts for co-parenting, and 4pts for knowing exactly how I like my coffee in the morning but only nets 13pts in the grand ranking of connections.

That’s just silly! But that’s how most of us do it.

But we don’t have to, yeah?

Look – in this relatively new world of reconfigured connections, it is perhaps the deep friendships that are coming through the most for us. Let’s take a moment (or longer) to appreciate how meaningful and impactful they actually are, and honor them in kind. Elevate the connections that feed your soul, not just the ones that would make good summer blockbusters. Make sure your priorities are hitting the high notes. Set aside romance as a metric and let your platonic heart have the microphone for a moment. Whose names get called out? What would it look like to assign those folks the same intrinsic value as your romantic connections?

And the pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow: when you allocate the amount of emotional labor and energy to platonic connections that you do to romantic ones, you find the return on investment to be rewarding in ways you may not have imagined. 

It’s a paradigm shift for sure, but one that’s time has come. 

Photo by Edvard Alexander Rølvaag on Unsplash