How studying friendship has changed the way I understand my own loneliness

I enjoyed this article by Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl. This segment, early on in her piece, raises the key issue.

I have what romantic movies and popular culture tell us is important: a partner, children, a job and a mortgage.

But it isn’t quite enough.

And it made me wonder whether the life path many of us – myself included – are following might, in fact, contain some built-in flaws.

Does this path leave too little room for the relationships defined by choice and equality? The relationships that aren’t about starting a family, but about friends?

We are raised to follow a particular social script in life. One in which career, marriage and children take centre stage and where friendship is assigned a less important role.

Many of us leave behind youth – when friendship often plays a central part – in favour of the so-called serious romantic relationship of adulthood. More broadly, some people tend to treat friendship as a kind of optional icing on the cake rather than the dough that holds it all together.

Why is it that, as we move away from childhood, friendship gets devalued? How did we come to treat family as necessary, while friendship is merely nice-to-have?

I’m not arguing for less family. I’m arguing for more friendship. I think it’s time that many of us put friendships into the same ‘necessary’ category as family.