Musings: Romantic Friendships

Original blog post made on April 26, 2021 on the Urfavfilosopher Medium Blog

I.

On our way to Moses Hall in the fall of 2015, during a visiting research appointment at the University of California Berkeley, I asked my mentor Niko Kolodny “What, for you, is the difference between friendships and romantic relationships?”

To my surprise, Niko responded that the question was a “good one.” The question hadn’t really struck me as a good one; certainly not one good enough to baffle someone whose thinking about love I truly respected. I was looking for some kind of metaphysical distinction between romantic relationships and friendships; something that would help me identify the necessary and sufficient conditions separating them from one another.

By this time, I had already disambiguated romantic relationships from the activities that are generally thought to characterize them in my work on relational contracts. It was around this time, circa 2014, that I was coming around to what we may call romantic nihilism — the idea that there is no essence to romantic love that distinguishes it from friendship. Around this same time, I concluded that romantic love and their pre-requisite romantic relationships were a social convention. To my mind, this makes the most sense of the historical notion of the romantic (which we see emerging only around the 18th century).

But if romantic love and romantic relationships are social conventions, what of friendship? Might they be merely conventional too? Furthermore, what about the notions that is now at the center of our concentration — romantic friendships? Are they possible? If, so, what exactly are they?

How we answer the lattermost of these questions depend heavily on how we analyze each of these concepts.

II. Lovers and Friends

A lot about Nathan Rambukkana’s perspective that intimate relationships exist on a spectrum resonates with me. Situating all intimate relationships on one and the same spectrum complicates the thought that the differences between romantic relationships and friendships are necessarily differences in kind or in degree. As such, the distinction between them falls far short of ontological discretion. In other words, romantic relationships are not necessarily more intimate than friendships. After all, some of our friendships have lengthier histories with far more robust intimate experiences than our newly forming romantic relationships.

But what about the response that friendships and romantic relationships are “just different” kinds of things? Perhaps I could be convinced. (I remind the reader of my question to Niko in section I) Yet, when I ask where we might find this difference in kind, I am met with two common responses:

· The first response involves an appeal to certain kinds of activities that are commonly preserved for relationships that fall under a socially designated romantic moniker (i.e. “girlfriend”, “boyfriend”, “partner”, “spouse”, etc.)

· The second response involves appeal to particular emotions, attitudes, or states (i.e. care, concern, love, vulnerability, jealousy, etc.) that are believed to be appropriate for romantic relationships, but not for friendships.

We should take these in turn.

Regarding the first response, the most common activity that gets cited is sexual involvements. Many of us accept as straightforwardly true that several other activities overlap between friends and lovers such as going bowling, watching Netflix and chilling, or sharing intimate stories with one another. But when people are “just friends”, as Caroline Simon notes, there is an implication that they are not sleeping with each other. There is a further implication that because friends aren’t sleeping with one another, that their relationship is significantly less intimate.

“Friends with benefits” (FWB) relationships provide a fine counterexample though. FWB’s characterize relationships between friends where sexual involvement is present. Perhaps calling them “friends with benefits” relationships is a bit misleading though, as friendships just are the kinds of things that we benefit from even without having sex. In the most excellent cases, friends encourage and support our flourishing, which seems to me self-evidently beneficial.

Lawrence Thomas captures this fact wonderfully:

“Friends love one another, and for that very reason they take delight in one another’s flourishing. There is an enormous bond of trust between them — a bond that is cemented by mutual self-disclosure. And they have a commanding perspective of one another’s life — a perspective that comes in the wake of their mutual self-disclosure and their maximizing the amount of time that they spend together. Finally, friends are deeply loyal to one another. Obviously, not all who call themselves friends are friends in this way.”

Friends are, simply put, companions in life assisting us along our very own unique journeys. Sex does not change or complicate this fact. This seems especially true given that many people wish for their romantic lovers to also be their friends. When one’s romantic lover is also a friend, romantic relationships amount to something like friendship plus sex. But FWBs have sex outside of romantic relationships and this rattles the foundation of a conceptual distinction being found in sex.

If we cling to the idea that sex is reserved for relationships that fall under a socially designated romantic moniker (i.e. “girlfriend”, “boyfriend”, “partner”, “spouse”, etc.) oddities seem to emerge. For example, it would need to be the case that FWBs sex metaphysically transforms their friendship into a romantic relationship. This would be true independent of whether the relata acknowledge its true (i.e. “Yall really together but yall just don’t know it”). But we should be suspicious of views of romantic relationships that disregard the attitudes of the relata; lest we find ourselves involved in relationships without our own knowledge or consent.

Sex and romantic love clearly come apart. The appeal to FWBs goes some way in showing this. On another hand, though, we must keep in mind that some romantic relationships are not sexually involved either as in the case of folks who are asexual or folks whose disabilities prevent them from engaging in sexual activity. So while FWBs show that friendships can involve sex, they do not necessarily show that they can be romantic, which brings us to our second point — i.e. that romantic relationships (and thereby romantic love) involves particular emotions, attitudes, or states (i.e. care, concern, love, vulnerability, jealousy, etc.) that are believed to be appropriate for romantic relationships, but not for friendships.

For some, how we are brought to feel about our romantic partners or in our romantic relationships does not resemble the emergent emotions in our friendships. Romantic love is, for them, a unique constellation or complex of emotions. The problem with the thought that romantic love involves a particular complex of emotions including care, concern, vulnerability, jealousy, and the like, is that we often feel these emotions appropriately in our friendships as well. It should come as no surprise that we care for, are concerned about, are vulnerable with, jealous (of or about) matters pertaining to our friendships. (See Thomas’ insight above) This, again, renders the alleged conceptual distinction between friendships and romantic relationship rather weak.

Mass media plays a role in how our default attitudes about love are shaped. We are oversaturated by narratives we inherit from romance genres. The romance genre across various forms of media (music, movies, shows, books, etc.) advertise the association between romantic love and this emotion complex (see section 5.2). But we hear far less about the emotion complexes that characterize excellent friendships — their overlap breathes clandestinely.

It is no wonder, then, that our default assumptions about the distinction between friendships and romantic relationships attempt to attach the emotion complex to the latter and not the former. But for all of the art that imitates life, some art is fictitious.

Both responses about where we the difference lies, seemingly stop short of a satisfactory explanation.

III. Relationships as a Social Convention

Here I would like to return the work of Nathan Rambukkana in more detail. I briefly mentioned earlier that Rambukkana’s work places intimate relationships on one and the same spectrum. Rambukkana’s motivation was to create a framework through which he could make legible the distinctions in value judgements that we make regarding monogamous and non-monogamous relationships and the privileges associated with our judgements. For Rambukkana, monogamy and non-monogamy “are two sides of the same socio-cultural coin”. He goes on to say that, “they are two aspects of a single system for relating sexually, romantically, socially, and culturally, with multiple parts and different articulations.”

These insights are important because they create a landscape where relationships exist within a variegated and interpenetrating field outside of our more traditional social binary — or what he calls the “highly limited heteronormative mold that casts them as separate.” An outcome of viewing the landscape through this prism is that, insofar as friendships are also intimate kinds of human relationships, they too are located at various places across and throughout this spectrum.

Much like myself and Niko Kolodny, Rambukkana’s work makes “relationship” the primary fulcrum along which our analyses of love and intimacy should turn. On a metaphysical level, interpersonal relationships exist whenever two or more people are related through a historical and ongoing pattern of concern. This is true of relationships between friends, family, co-workers, FWBs, monogamous lovers, and non-monogamous ones. Relationships are thus broad; indeed and seem to give more credence to Rambukkana’s landscape.

Kolodny maintains that relationships are also individuated by the identities of the relata. While true, they are also individuated by the conventional labels that we think to assign them. For many people, the nominal distinctions across the list of relationships I’ve just described are not merely putative, but are substantive. It’s this thought that I challenge.

Recall that we’ve already rejected the thoughts that certain kinds of activities that are commonly preserved for relationships that fall under a socially designated romantic moniker and that particular emotions, attitudes, or states (i.e. care, concern, love, vulnerability, jealousy, etc.) that are only appropriate for romantic relationships, but not for friendships.

What seems more true to me is that the distinction between these relationships is conventional. In many ways relationships are subject to conformance or adherence to accepted social standards, whatever they be, at some place and time (the social and cultural inclusions in Rambukkana’s landscape). Beware that I am careful here to avoid saying “merely” conventional, as for many people these conventions have been imbued with meaning.

In our society, romantic relationships are marked by a mutual agreement in attitude between the relata about the most descriptively appropriate social designation for their relationship. Many people are just fine assigning the readily available (read as preset) names for intimate relationships — for there are many friends, best friends, co-worker, partners, girlfriends and boyfriends, etc.. Still for many others, including those whose relationships have been historically marginalized, invalidated, and relegated to a realm of social and cultural invisibility such as black folx, lesbians, gays, trans folx, and polyamorists, different names and descriptions have emerged as much from creativity as necessity. Thus, we can now more legibly read relationships such as “work wives/husbands”, “FWBs”, “situationships (read as entanglements)”, “throuples”, “triads”, “quads”, or “care networks”.

Whether the assignment occurs formally (i.e. through asking someone out or asking someone to be one’s friends) or not is not the most relevant thing (although for many people these formalities carry meaningful consequences). Instead, more important is that the attitude of the relata must agree. In other words, if asked whether they have a certain relationship or not (i.e. “Are you two more than just friends?”), there would be agreement among the participants in that relationship about whether said relationship exists. Suffice it to say that a relationship’s relata are the one’s whose autonomy reigns supreme in categorizing the relationship(s) they believe themselves to have.

IV. Romantic Friendships

It is likely no surprise that I believe, without hesitation, that so-called “romantic friendships” can exist. To my surprise, in a conversation on Clubhouse, I found that some people are already employing this language to describe the relationships they have with their relata. For them, it appeared to be the case that they wanted to use the designation to describe friendships that were deeply intimate by way of closeness, vulnerability, information sharing, and physical affection that stopped short of penetrative sex. But I am prepared to accepted something broader. For, why can’t it be the case that romantic friends do have sex? Why oughtn’t we accept that romantic friends have no physical affection whatsoever? Or who’s intimacies might be capped by boundary setting?

These questions are not at all easy ones to address and will perhaps disappoint our hopes for a neat (read as hierarchical) social and cultural arrangement of our intimate lives. But our intimate lives are messy, and we should not search for more precision than the subject allows. Whether or not the emergence of romantic friendships is more socially and culturally advantageous or detrimental should be explored. Just as loudly as I can hear the objections rooted in exploitation, I can also see transformative potential for social change through intimate relationship diversification. While the former concern is serious enough, I have far more often tended to be a proponent of the latter.