Who should we build our lives around?
Why our priorities may be backwards.
We all know how it goes—a friend gets hitched and suddenly they disappear from the friend group. Another friend starts dating and stops making plans. Yet another friend moves away with their spouse and leaves us all behind.
It’s a tale as old as time; except actually, it isn’t.
The nuclear family is a fairly new invention. Despite our entire culture being structured around it, the nuclear family (a term coined in the 1920s by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski) only began to emerge during the Industrial Revolution, in response to economic changes that required people to move away from their communities to obtain factory jobs. In essence, the nuclear family was a more mobile, flexible, and efficient unit that allowed for capitalistic productivity to skyrocket. It reached peak popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s, and has steadily declined since. Research indicates that its correlations to consumerism, individualism, and social isolation have something to do what that decline. Some are even now calling the nuclear family a mistake. So while it may seem completely normal and socially acceptable these days to put marriage and immediate family before all else, it’s important to remember: it wasn’t always like this.
I was browsing my local bookshop recently and stumbled upon Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good by David R. Samson. The title is surely pandering to a specific audience (I’ll let you guess who that is), but I have to give it to Samson—he’s found a great way to get relational and community-building knowledge into the hands of bio-hacking bros. (And god knows, men need it.)
I haven’t finished the book, but this quote from historian Stephanie Coontz stood out to me:
“Until a hundred years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty, and religion.”
Antisocial? Self-absorbed? Sounds like a recipe for a loneliness epidemic, especially in a country where hyper-individualism is not only rampant, but revered.
And yet, we have not only brought this model to fruition; we have bought into it. Marriage—or at least coupledom, as views around marriage continue to shift—is viewed as the pinnacle of social achievement in modern times. Being single is considered a stepping stone, an in-between time, rather than a legitimate lifestyle choice. Friendship is second-tier, less significant, and consistently deprioritized. Instead we spend countless hours and energy searching for The One, the perfect dream partner who is going to check every box and fulfill every need and anticipate every desire. This person will be our closest friend, our most compatible sexual partner, our emotional safety blanket, our emergency contact, our favorite cuddle buddy. They will also be the best co-parent and financial partner, supply us with endless romantic gestures, and share a bed and a bathroom with us. Forever.
Although many of us recognize this is an impossible amount of expectations and responsibilities to put on a single person, we continue to solely structure our lives around being a couple. Yeah, we might say, my partner doesn’t have to be everything to me—but they’re still my first priority.
It sounds innocent and beautiful. Romantic, even. How empathetic and realistic of us, to bear witness to our partner’s limitations and still choose them. Still make them number one. It’s humble, perhaps—but it doesn’t change the outcome.
By making our romantic partner our main focus, our capacity to show up for our larger networks of community is significantly strained. As Faith Hill writes in an article for The Atlantic:
“. . . the minutes you spend alone with your partner are minutes not spent deepening connections with friends and relatives or building new bonds, not spent relishing the pleasures of solitude or enjoying whatever interests are uniquely yours. If you build a life with your relationship at the center, everything else gets pushed to the perimeter.”
Maybe this means your friends are relegated to once a week Friday night dinners. Your hobbies are reserved for the occasional Saturday afternoon while your partner takes a nap on the couch. You don’t volunteer as much, you stop joining organized groups, and you’re more likely to skip social outings and events. Your sense of self dwindles, your choices begin to seem more limited, and as a result, you feel more isolated. I know I did.
When I got married at the tender age of twenty-three, I thought I had it all figured out. I had a companion now, someone to do life with, and it felt great—at first. Over time, I began to notice how my marriage was holding me back from the life I really wanted. I never expected to feel lonely, but that’s exactly what happened. Despite having some friends and a few hobbies and reasonable time apart, our marriage functioned like a silo. The privatization of our lives was stifling. We didn’t know our neighbors. Our closest friends lived hours away. Those near us were busy building their own coupledoms, and if they were single, didn’t include us in their plans often enough—likely because they assumed we’d be busy together. On top of it all, we weren’t fulfilling each other’s needs like married partners were “supposed” to (or at least, not enough of them to feel as though it were worth it). And so at some point, we went our separate ways, deciding we’d function much better as friends than life partners.
But it wasn’t just that. By the time we divorced, I was starting to think that a romantic partner may not be as essential as having a real, honest-to-goodness community. Something deep inside told me that was what had been missing. Don’t get me wrong; having a romantic partner is still something I desire. But humans are hardwired for social connection, not for coupling up.
What would life look like if we put our friends at the center instead? What if the choices we made were in service to our community rather than strictly our pair-bonds? What if friend groups were the basis of society, not partnerships?
In his book, Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong, Eric Barker argues that “friendships are scientifically proven to improve almost every relationship and experience in your life.” Not only that, Barker concludes, but people with five or more friendships are 60% happier than those with less. That’s a huge impact that showcases how important friendship is to life satisfaction. It implies that without friendship, we may not have a society at all, but merely individuals, floating aimlessly in the current of capitalism.
Media and social messaging would have us believe otherwise. Between romcoms and $50,000 weddings and the barrage of sappy Instagram anniversary posts, all signs point towards partnership as the key to happiness. But data doesn’t lie. In his book, Happy Ever After, author Paul Dolan cites evidence from the American Time Use Survey, which compared levels of pleasure and unhappiness in unmarried, married, divorced, separated, and widowed individuals. The study discovered levels of happiness reported by those who were married was higher than those who did not have spouses—but only when their spouse was in the room. People who were not married actually reported lower levels of misery than married individuals who were asked when their spouse was not present.
There’s an important distinction to be made here, though.
It’s not that romantic relationships are inherently making us miserable; it’s the over-exaggerated significance we’ve placed on them that’s the problem.
In other words, it’s not that we shouldn’t build our lives around our romantic partnerships at all. It’s that we shouldn’t only build them around our romantic partnerships. There’s gotta be that love-life balance Faith Hill writes about in her article.
So, what’s the balance look like, and how do we make it happen?
It’s impossible to list all the ways we might better structure our lives, but some ideas might include everything from choosing not to live with your romantic partner (aka being apartners), raising children with friends, or starting a cohousing community with your besties, to smaller shifts like prioritizing solo travel, joining a hobby club, or passing up that fancy new job that will move you away from all your friends. (Because let’s face it: work, unlike friendship, isn’t likely to increase your happiness by 60%.) Whatever actions we decide to take, we should ask ourselves—am I making choices that are community-based? How can I prioritize, rely on, support, and strengthen my platonic connections? How can I create a more egalitarian social network?
Our society doesn’t make it easy to do this. Every aspect of American life is structured around the idea of a couple or a nuclear family. This includes little things, like restaurant tables seating two or four people, and wedding invitations only allowing for a plus one. But it also includes more serious and impactful areas of our lives. Polyamorous relationships aren’t recognized in any U.S. court of law. Purchasing a house with friends is actually illegal in many parts of the country. And the cost of living in most cities makes marriage quite enticing—who doesn’t want to save on rent and score some tax breaks?
One of my favorite writers, Anne Helen Peterson, recently wrote about why we should move near our friends, and why it’s so hard to do so. But it’s not impossible, and the research shows that it’s worth it. Friendships are great for our health, our happiness, and our sense of self. They provide us a plethora of support, distributed amongst an entire group instead of a single person. They give us balance, perspective, and help us differentiate ourselves from our spouses. Friends are our sounding boards, our expanders, our safety nets, our confidantes.
Maybe the easiest, albeit morbid way to look at it is this: loneliness kills, more than poor diets and lack of exercise. We have plenty of research and history at this point to show that marriage and the nuclear family are not only not helping in this regard, but further isolating us. Just check out the Reddit thread /suburbanhell (which I’ll be writing about soon!) if you want more anecdotal evidence.
It’s well-past time we build a better balance when it comes to our relational structures. If we can step back from putting partnership at the center, and let friendship take a bigger role in our lives, we may just find that our sense of self, our romantic relationships, and our communities will truly start to thrive.
