Why do we expect different things from love than from our friendships?

About being ‘just’, ‘more than’ and ‘less than’ friends

It’s barely the case that we have a definition of friendship, as if we all somehow know and internalised what friendship is. Personally, I struggle to find a concept that helps me understand what friendship means and how it differentiates from other forms of relationships between two people. Even more so, I wonder whether it is actually ever possible to draw a line between friendship and other emotional attachments without having a clear definition of friendship in the first place. Perhaps, we shouldn’t make a distinction at all.

What does it mean to be friends with someone and when do we know where friendship ends, and something ‘more’ or ‘less’ starts?

One could say that friendship ends, and something ‘more’ starts once we find ourselves ‘falling in love with’ or ‘having feelings for’ someone. But why is it so confusing sometimes to draw the line?

I think part of the confusion around friendship and ‘something more’ than that lies in the fact that the distinction is artificial in itself, if not even deceptive. Our modern cultural perception of feeling ‘more than just friendship’ is already deeply misleading by the very act of using the word ‘just’. For defining a relation of any kind to a person as ‘just friendship’ leads us to think that

a) there exists a hierarchical order of relations, and

b) friendship is of lower emotional and, perhaps even cultural value, than any other higher feeling, which we were taught to conceive as ‘love’ or whatever one may call it.

I don’t believe that neither, a value system for emotional affection, nor putting ‘love’ as such on a pedestal is problematic in itself. I leave that up to people’s own decision on how they want to perceive and judge their relations. But I do see a problem in how we are taught to think of these big, unattainable concepts we refer to as ‘emotional affection’ or ‘real feelings’.

It appears that we only talk about emotional affection in the name of ‘love’, and I think that’s where the problem lies.

Deep emotional relationships are expected to make us feel exuberantly joyful and content and are equally anticipated to evoke irrationally painful sensations within ourselves.

We are taught that if you really like someone ‘more than just a friend’, it needs to be a feeling of all-encompassing, consuming and overly exciting nature. That it should arrive perfectly formed, completely change us, and make us always feel ‘good’. At the same time, we’re taught that we should suffer from it, that it hurts, but that it’s somehow ‘worth it’.

I think that’s delusional, if not even manic. In fact, from a psychological point of view, its all-consuming nature mirrors traits of addictive relationships, its longing for perfection mirrors traits of delusion, its co-dependency mirrors a childish dependence on another person and its apparent need for suffering in the name of love mirrors an abusive relationship with ourselves.

And we’re not to blame. Going to extremes of personal sacrifice and the painful twinge of loving someone so much it hurts is so sensationalised in our culture [think of movies, poetry and whatnot], that conceiving emotional affection as ‘only’ moving through life together and enriching each other’s lives by one’s company, doesn’t sound sexy enough to be valued as equally worthy.

As though, if we don’t feel tortured by our affection to someone or if we don’t feel the earth shudder beneath us in case of separation, it is not ‘more than’ but ‘just’ friendship, where friendship is automatically juxtaposed in opposition to this maniac stage of extreme emotions.

It is this very act of putting friendship on the other end, that labels it as a type of relationship which is safe from abnormal emotional swings.

It supposedly protects us from these stages by evening out extremes and consequently forming more stable and permanent stages of emotional attachment.

So, if we think that a tendency for mania is what ‘more than friends’ is supposed to be, how can feeling anxious, confused or emotional pain be of higher value than feeling calm, supported and accepted as an autonomous self? This is not just wrong on a logical level, but, more pervasively, eminently debatable from a moral standpoint as it is highly unlikely that this is what an individual strives for to live a good and enriching life.

If that’s what ‘more than friends’ means then, following that line of thought, we should all, both personally but also morally, strive for being ‘just’ friends, since friendship contains all of the healthy traits of interhuman relations, i.e., choosing to move through life together, facing and combating challenges together and fully accepting and supporting another to be our best selves and growing together.

So, no toxic shit and irrational nonsense is the maxim we ought to live by. So far so good.

But to be honest, I don’t believe that it’s as easy as that. The truth is, there are many nuances. What about attraction or love between equals, and the unconditional love we may feel for our family? We certainly don’t perceive them as necessitating an unhealthy or sacrificing character, yet we would not commonly perceive them as friendship, wouldn’t we? So, if they are neither friendship, not emotional exuberance, do categories like these help us classify our affection to others in the first place?

Perhaps, the simple answer is that there actually shouldn’t be a distinction. Reflecting on myself, I come to realise that, to me, friendship is a kind of love, which is equally probable to turn into ‘something more’ than it is to turn ‘something less’ and which is not a stable concept in its own nature.

We may grow up learning that friendships are a safe bet and that they should always work, but the act of putting the label of friendship on a relationship we have does not make that relation stable nor healthy. It seems illogical to me to assume that friendship is a magical balance of our otherwise irrational, extreme emotions and that it’s always stable by virtue of two people agreeing to be friends. To me, it’s quite the opposite as:

1.) It is barely the case that a friendship is ‘built’ by two people actively taking the decision to be friends, but rather that it evolves naturally and effortlessly over time.

2.) It is actually dynamic as it consists of various different nuances of emotional affection, which may change over time, just as we evolve with time as well.

Ideally, friendship should not be unhealthy, yet in some cases, it can turn into something unhealthy, no matter what we label we previously put on it.

We are certainly less prone to entering manic stages of emotional affection, but, as humans, we are not (always) perfect. We are we neither fully immune to sexual tensions, nor are we immune to unreasonable demands or emotions we feel for our friends. It would be naïve to think of friendship as being free from emotional ups and downs. Friendship is emotional and, by implication, painful as we are making ourselves vulnerable to another. Similarly, friendship may come together with attraction just the same way it may come without attraction.

I believe the mistake lies in understanding friendship, ‘more than’, or ‘less than’ that as an exact science that is always stable. Our definition of our emotional engagements is defined by our own value system and beliefs. To understand the meaning of a relationship to a person means looking at ourselves and another, instead of looking at the label we put on it.

A healthy relation to someone is a delicate and always-moving balance between our own self-care and a care for the other, nothing more nothing less.