Identity — Love— Friendship

Everything’s platonic

While society may engender us to believe that love is hierarchical, Makena Monaco explores the inherent beauty of platonic love and how it can be just as fulfilling as romance.

Since I was six years old, I have had the same best friend, an honour and privilege I’ve come to realise is denied to most. Changing schools, families breaking up, growing pains – there are so many circumstances that could have uprooted our friendship, taken away the last 15 years of my life and reshaped it, but they have not. Being her best friend is not a responsibility that I take for granted.

There’s certainly pure luck involved in our relationship lasting for so long. We were both lucky enough to end up at the same school, to conveniently live two miles away from each other, and to develop similar interests as we grew up. But there’s also another, more calculated element that makes up our moral blueprints and firmly cements our friendship more and more each year. We both recognise that platonic relationships are just as important and fulfilling as romantic relationships.

Ideas of romantic love are pushed onto us from a very early age. Whimsical fairytales, often ones where the prince swoops in to save the helpless princess, are popularised in bedtime stories and classroom readings. These stories can paint a beautiful picture for children and adults alike, because who isn’t hopeful about having their own fairytale ending? However, there is so much more to a “perfect ending” than traditional heteronormative narratives have let on.

It’s easy to crave the traditional ending. A lot of the time, we’re convinced that everything else will fall into place when romantic love is achieved - financial success, growth of the family, or career improvements. Furthermore, sometimes we’re so focused on wanting to complete the entire picture that we’ll force pieces into our puzzle that don’t necessarily fit. Even if that means staying in a relationship that’s wrong for us. When things don’t fall into place at the same time, it feels like something is missing without the element of romantic love, even when we are often already surrounded by so much love. Friendships, relationships with family members, or even the short relationships we develop with strangers, are all reminders that connections exist in many forms.

The relationships curated between your closest friends and your family (found or blood) are statistically going to outlast some of your romantic relationships. Most importantly, the relationship you have with yourself is going to last forever. If you do not seek out love purely and solely for yourself, your quest to find romantic love becomes ten times more difficult. Curating a healthy relationship with yourself is the first step to forming one with someone else. How can we change the narrative in our own lives? Is it possible to de-centre romanticism while still searching for it? Of course it is. There is nothing wrong with craving a uniquely romantic relationship. It is a beautiful and terrifying affair that is distinct to the human experience, which makes us prone to seek it out. However, while seeking out this romantic love, don’t forget to cherish all the love you already hold for yourself and for others.

I know that not everybody is lucky enough to have a best friend of 15 years, or even of five years, but I do know that there are so many avenues to find platonic love in life. Take the long way home, join a new club at university, connect with others in the huge realm of the digital world. You’ll travel to different corners of the world with people you’ve only known for three weeks. You’ll laugh in a pub with the girls you met in the bathroom at 1am. There are so many lessons yet to be learned, too many for a romantic partner to teach you in one go. Trust yourself and recognise all the love that already exists around you, and it will all fall into place in the most perfectly untraditional way.