What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

I also think the focus on romantic sexual relationships as the only viable path to support and love creates a lot of neuroses that ironically make partnering harder. People are obsessed with their looks, get jealous over their romantic partners' attention, etc. In the lesbian and gay community, it's also common to either deal with abusive relationships or commit too early because unless you're in a large city, this might be your only chance at partnering and if partnering is your only chance to be loved or supported, you just put up with it. (Bisexuals usually just date the opposite sex).

There are certainly benefits to having your 'person' be your sexual partner: Sex helps with intimacy and hopefully creates a part of your life where you associate each other with pleasure. If you're of opposite sexes, you can have children that reflect both of you which makes parenting easier. It can also compensate for weaknesses in one's family or community of origin: somebody leaving a cult can find love.

But there are benefits to other types of primary relationships as well. For me and my sister, for example:

- No worries about the bedroom. We don't have to worry about staying sexy enough, our partners losing attraction to us, etc. Sex drives change over time and are finicky and hard to control.

- We've literally known each other our entire lives. You can find this in a romantic partner but most people aren't marrying people they've known since they were four years old.

- Related to the above, we come from the same environment and have a lot of the same touchstones which makes communication way easier. Instead of having to explain my entire childhood history and why I would be reacting a certain way to something, I can just say, "You're being like Mom. :( " and it's automatically understood.

- Sibling bonds aren't dissolvable and are relationships of equals. You can hate your sibling, but you're always siblings. Marriages and romantic partnerships end. Parental bonds have power dynamics encoded in them.

- Practically, us living together and pooling resources allows for maximization of inter-generational wealth building. Whatever our parents have - if anything - when they pass won't be split.

If what I am saying is just common sense, then why is what you have to say "quite special"?

In all sincerity, it sounds like you're just talking out of your ass. The world exists around you, not inside your own mind. You are no more or less special than me.

Seems like you're making assumptions about the way the causation flows here.

I liked this piece a lot. However, I think one failing, which is also tripping up many of the commenters here, is this insistence on ordering one's relationships. Who's my number one?

The moment you ask that, you end up with the social norm that one's sexual-romantic partner must be the number one. So you have a ton of people in the comments here who are very defensive of that norm, and you have people like those in the article who are consciously opposing it - they have a different number one - by finding an intimate friend or platonic life partner.

But what if we gave up this silly notion?

I have a cohabiting sexual partner. We're sexually monogamous, because as with most human beings that works best for us. Is my partner my "number one"? I genuinely don't know how to answer that question, if I seriously think about it. There's a strong inclination to just say "yes", because that's the expectation when you have a partner like this, but I'm looking for something deeper that would ground such a response.

My partner and I care for each other (the action, not the emotion) more than for anyone outside the relationship; we know more of each other's secrets. But I have friends with whom I have an enormous amount of emotional intimacy, who understand me better in many ways than my partner does. I love them very deeply; I argue less with them, and sometimes building intimacy with them is easier than with my partner.

While I fall mostly into the norm, I don't feel compelled to compare these relationships to the one I have with my sexual partner. Each of them is important. They're all "friendships" of one stripe or another. I think that's the solution here: to the extent that marriage is the "center of life" it's because marriage is just a friendship like any other. What the article is really about is the American norm that one's marriage be one's only deep, emotionally intimate friendship.

When I was working at Starbucks ages ago, my best friend would come on by regularly. We're both tall men.

Coworkers thought I was gay, and had a sexual relationship with him, because it was and still is a strong bond.

In actuality, Im bisexual, and we weren't in a sexual relationship. But men aren't "allowed" to have close bonds with other men. There are exceptions: military, police, mens social clubs (masons, shriners, etc). Outside of those, society thinks you're just gay.

As for me, I don't particularly care what "society" thinks. I'm not going to trade my agency for some vapid "society groupthink". Did I let my coworkers think I'm gay and dating my best friend? Sure did. And it had a cool other effect - women coworkers treated me more like one of 'them', and was much less defensive than around the other men who worked there.