February relationship series: love and friendship, two sides of the same coin

When we think about relationships, the word that often comes to mind is love. It can give us a sense of purpose, bring out the noblest parts of us and reveal things we never knew about ourselves. Too often, however, we think of love applying only to our romantic partners. In honor of everyone else, I’d like to talk this week about friendship.

Friendship and love are more alike than we think. Both kinds of relationships offer sanctuary. Both offer a space in which someone accepts not only the part of ourselves we present to the world, but also our fears and anxieties, our passions and preoccupations. Both kinds of relationships lend us support in trying times, and both ask that we stand up for the people we care about and help them in return. Both kinds of relationships require compromise and effort to flourish.

If love and friendship are so similar, what separates one from the other? The answer I often hear is twofold: sex and intimacy.

According to many, the difference between a friend and a lover is that they have no desire to have sex with their friends. Is this really the whole difference? Like a lot of common sense, it’s a quick answer that falls apart under scrutiny. There are countless elderly couples who have lost their libido with age and couples who are asexual or abstinent, but nonetheless share a deep love for each other. People in healthy, stable relationships often find themselves sexually attracted to a friend or a stranger. The line is blurrier than most of us care to think.

The issue of intimacy is a more complex one, because our beliefs about it invariably become our reality. Although people cannot help who they are attracted to, intimacy is a choice. If we believe friendship is less intimate than love, we will keep our friends at arm’s length. The question is not “How is friendship different from love?” but “Why do we treat our friendships and romances differently?”

Much of the answer derives from the way we are taught to love. Whether we like it or not, we live in a society still governed by heterosexual and monogamous customs. There is a fear, particularly among men, that a close same-sex friendship will be construed as homosexual. We owe much of this idea to the work of Sigmund Freud, whose unscientific and erroneous theories popularized the idea of latent homosexuality and did irreparable damage to same-sex friendships. For proof, do a web search for “male affection in vintage photos” for countless portraits of friends holding hands, sitting in each other’s laps, and expressing a level of affection that surprises us today.

Why, then, don’t we simply prefer opposite-sex friendships? Remember that our society also revolves around monogamous norms. When a partner is close with a member of their preferred sex, we fear that closeness will turn into love and that we will be abandoned for someone new. Nevertheless, it is increasingly common for young people to have close friends of the preferred sex and healthy relationships simultaneously, and alternative relationship models like open relationships and polyamory are demonstrating that a deep affection or love for one person does not prevent us from loving others, just as having a close friend does not mean we cannot forge new friendships.

If sexual attraction and intimacy can exist in both friendship and love, what makes the two different? Nothing, except how we choose to express them.

When it comes to love, our only fault is in not sharing it enough. We draw lines in the sand about how we can love one person or another, who and how many, when and how, but in the end, love is not scarce unless we make it so. Love does not diminish the more it is shared; we only learn better how to love.

David Billig is a UF linguistics masters student. This column is the second in a series of four.