Why Does Romance Get First Dibs?

There's a Word for This

Philosopher Elizabeth Brake coined the term amatonormativity to describe the assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive, romantic, long-term coupled relationship and that this kind of relationship should be privileged over other forms of care.

It's related to mononormativity, but it goes deeper.

Mononormativity says the normal and legitimate romantic structure is one exclusive couple.

Amatonormativity asks why the romantic partnership is supposed to be the center of adult life in the first place.

Polyamory obviously challenges the first assumption.

I'm increasingly unconvinced that it automatically challenges the second.

We can have a spouse, two partners, a comet, a friend with benefits, and a couple of casual connections and still organize our lives around the assumption that romantic and sexual relationships are the relationships that really count.

Friendships get whatever time is left.

And I think that's worth examining.

I Had a Platonic Crush

During the pandemic, I made a friend through our local polyamory community.

We became very close.

She joined my family for Christmas. I loved spending time with her. I looked forward to seeing her. I cared about what was happening in her life. If I'm being completely honest, I had a giant platonic crush on her.

I didn't want to date her.

I didn't want to have sex with her.

I didn't secretly wish our friendship would turn into something romantic.

I just really fucking liked her.

For five or six years, she was single. Then she eventually developed two romantic relationships.

And I basically stopped seeing her.

Not because we'd had a fight.

Not because either of us decided the friendship was over.

There was just suddenly no room.

The romantic relationships came in, and friendship absorbed the loss.

Eventually one of those relationships ended. She had more availability again, and we started spending time together.

And I finally found enough language to gently tell her:

I felt forgotten.

I wasn't angry that she'd fallen in love. I didn't believe I was owed a particular number of hours of her time. And importantly, I had never actually told her how I understood our friendship.

But losing it hurt.

And that experience forced me to confront something I hadn't articulated even after years of thinking critically about relationships:

How the hell do you tell someone you want to friend-date them?

We Don't Have Good Language for Important Friendships

Think about the vocabulary we have for romantic relationships.

Dating.

Partner.

Boyfriend.

Girlfriend.

Fiancé.

Spouse.

Nesting partner.

Primary.

Comet.

We can debate those labels endlessly, and polyamorous people certainly do, but the point is that we recognize different forms and levels of romantic connection.

Then there's:

Friend.

That could mean someone whose memes you occasionally react to on Facebook.

Or it could mean the person you'd trust with your life.

"Best friend" gets us a little closer, but even that doesn't necessarily communicate commitment.

We don't really have a standard adult relationship conversation that says:

I don't want romance with you. I don't want sex with you. But you are one of my people. This relationship is deeply important to me, and I would like us to intentionally make room for it in our lives.

Maybe we should.

Because one thing I learned from my own experience was that I had expectations about a friendship I hadn't communicated.

That's on me too.

My friend couldn't know that I considered our relationship important enough that its disappearance would feel like a significant loss if I'd never told her.

We tell romantic partners what they mean to us.

Maybe we should tell our friends.

Friendship Is Expected to Be Flexible

There's a cultural script here that is so normal we barely notice it.

Romantic partners get scheduled time.

Friends understand that you're busy.

Romantic relationships require maintenance.

Friendships are supposed to pick up where they left off.

A partner needs reassurance during a major life transition.

Friends will understand.

Date night goes on the calendar.

Maybe you'll grab lunch with your friend if everybody's free.

And when someone falls deeply in love, we expect their availability to change.

There's even research suggesting that it does. Research by Robin Dunbar and colleagues found that entering a new romantic relationship was associated with losing roughly two people from a person's innermost circle of close relationships.

That doesn't mean falling in love makes someone a shitty friend.

Time is finite. New relationships require time. Lives change.

But that's precisely why I think the choices we make about that time deserve more attention.

When a new romantic relationship enters our life and a friendship quietly disappears, we have made a relationship decision even if nobody consciously decided anything.

The hierarchy made the decision for us.

Friendship Is a Relationship Skill

There's another thing I think we get wrong about friendship.

We talk constantly about the skills required to maintain romantic relationships.

Communication.

Conflict resolution.

Vulnerability.

Checking in.

Remembering important things.

Making time.

Offering emotional support.

Repairing ruptures.

Expressing affection.

Initiating plans.

Polyamorous people add even more skills to the list. Calendar management. NRE management. Negotiating agreements. Sexual-health communication. Navigating metamour relationships. Balancing multiple people's needs without assuming everyone wants the same thing.

But those aren't romantic relationship skills.

They're relationship skills.

Friendships require them too.

Yet we often treat friendship as though it's the one important human relationship that's supposed to run on perpetual motion.

We say marriage takes work.

Polyamory takes work.

Relationships take work.

Then we say:

"I haven't talked to my best friend in three years, but when we see each other it'll be like no time has passed!"

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it isn't.

Sometimes the friendship quietly died because nobody watered it.

The Friendship Labor Somebody Else Was Doing

The consequences of not learning these skills become particularly visible when we look at gender and aging.

Research on widowhood consistently finds that widowers experience greater loneliness and social isolation than widows. A 2024 systematic review of longitudinal research found that this gender difference appears repeatedly across studies.

There's a larger body of research and social commentary around men's friendship networks that helps make sense of why this deserves attention. Many men rely heavily on their female romantic partners for emotional intimacy and for some of the social labor that keeps relationships and community connections alive.

Think about the invisible work that can look like:

"We haven't seen Jim and Susan in forever. Let's invite them over."

Remembering someone's birthday.

Sending the holiday card.

Texting when a friend goes into the hospital.

Making the dinner plans.

Keeping up with what's happening in another family's life.

Remembering that it's been six months since you've seen someone.

One person may experience the result as:

We have friends.

But someone still had to maintain those friendships.

And when a romantic partner becomes the primary infrastructure through which someone accesses emotional intimacy, friendship, and community, losing that relationship can collapse far more than the romance itself.

That isn't an argument that women are naturally better at friendship.

It's an argument that friendship maintenance is learned labor.

If you never learn to do it, somebody else may end up doing it for you.

And that's an extraordinarily fragile way to build a support system.

Maybe We Should Actually Friend-Date

So I'm increasingly serious when I ask:

Why don't we friend-date?

Not secretly date our friends while insisting it's platonic.

Actually friend-date them.

Ask them to dinner.

Make recurring plans.

Put them on the calendar.

Take trips together.

Celebrate things that matter to us.

Tell them we love them.

Ask how they're doing and actually listen to the answer.

Talk about hurt feelings instead of assuming friendship isn't supposed to be that complicated.

Repair things when we fuck them up.

Tell someone:

"This friendship is an important relationship in my life. I want to make sure I'm taking care of it. Do you want that too?"

Why should that conversation belong exclusively to romance?

Maybe one of the skills we should be teaching in polyamorous communities isn't simply how to maintain multiple romantic relationships.

Maybe it's how to intentionally maintain multiple meaningful human relationships.

NRE Doesn't Only Affect Your Other Partners

Polyamorous people talk about new relationship energy constantly.

We warn people not to disappear into NRE and neglect their established partners.

Remember your date nights.

Check in with your nesting partner.

Don't suddenly cancel plans every time the exciting new person becomes available.

Make sure your existing relationships still receive care.

Good advice.

But what about your friends?

Why don't they make that list?

I've watched polyamorous people complain that their monogamous friends vanished the moment they got into serious relationships.

Then we turn around and do exactly the same thing.

We can meticulously manage Google Calendars containing three romantic relationships while assuming our closest friends will simply be there whenever we eventually have an opening.

That's not dismantling amatonormativity.

That's recreating it with more partners.

Sex Doesn't Make a Relationship Important

My own marriage has taught me something about this from the opposite direction.

My husband and I have been together for a very long time, and for most of the last decade our relationship has been platonic.

We don't have sex with each other anymore.

Getting there wasn't painless. It wasn't a situation where both people simultaneously stopped being interested and cheerfully shook hands about it.

We had to work through what that change meant.

Part of what eventually allowed us to do that was letting go of some of the ownership ideas we'd inherited about marriage, monogamy, romance, and sex.

We're still lovingly committed to each other.

We're still family.

Sex simply isn't part of our connection anymore.

And nothing about the absence of sex makes the relationship less real.

That experience and my friendships have taught me the same thing from opposite directions.

Sex doesn't create significance.

Neither does romance.

People do.

"Just Friends" Is Doing a Lot of Work

There's a phrase I would love to retire:

Just friends.

Are you two dating?

"No, we're just friends."

Did something happen between you?

"No, it was just a friendship."

Just.

As though we've already established the maximum possible significance of the relationship by establishing that nobody is fucking.

We also have a strange tendency to become suspicious when platonic relationships become sufficiently intimate.

You spend holidays together?

You travel together?

You tell each other you love each other?

You make major life decisions with each other in mind?

You reorganize your life to care for them?

Okay, but are you sure you're just friends?

Why does profound care require a sexual explanation before it makes sense?

Why can't friendship itself explain profound love?

Polyamory Doesn't Automatically Fix This

This is where I want polyamorous people, specifically, to sit with some discomfort.

Having multiple partners doesn't necessarily mean we've rejected relationship hierarchy in any meaningful cultural sense.

We may have rejected the idea that only one romantic relationship can be important.

That's different.

If every romantic and sexual relationship still automatically outranks every friendship, we've preserved one of the central assumptions of conventional relationship culture.

We've just expanded the romantic tier.

And I'm not arguing that every relationship should receive identical time, resources, or priority.

That wouldn't even make sense.

Relationships develop different levels of entanglement.

Someone may share your mortgage.

Someone may be raising children with you.

Someone may have known you for thirty years.

Someone may be your emergency contact.

Someone may need more care during a particular season of life.

Real relationships create real differences in responsibility.

The question isn't whether differences in priority exist.

It's whether we're making those decisions based on the actual relationships in front of us or simply allowing their labels to make those decisions for us.

What Makes Someone Family?

This is where amatonormativity stops being merely an interpersonal issue.

Our institutions do this too.

Marriage determines access to an enormous collection of legal and social benefits.

Family status affects medical decision-making, inheritance, insurance, leave, caregiving, housing, taxation, and countless other parts of adult life.

Elizabeth Brake's work on amatonormativity asks an important question:

Why should those protections privilege romantic relationships in the first place?

Her proposal for what she calls minimal marriage goes beyond simply adding polyamorous relationships to existing marriage law. She asks us to consider legal structures capable of recognizing adult care networks, including friendships and other non-romantic relationships.

I find the underlying question compelling even if we can debate exactly what the legal solution should look like.

Care is real whether or not the people providing it are fucking.

Once you see that, merely expanding the marriage box starts feeling insufficient.

What If We Recognized Care Instead?

Imagine if society made it easier for people to identify who their actual people are.

Not:

Who are you married to?

Not:

Who are you sleeping with?

Not:

Which relationship fits the culturally approved definition of family?

But:

Who do you care for?

Who cares for you?

Who have you made commitments to?

Who actually constitutes your support system?

For some people, those answers will describe a conventional married couple.

Great.

For someone else, they might describe several romantic partners.

For someone else, a sibling and two friends.

A queerplatonic partner.

Chosen family.

Friends raising children together.

Older adults sharing a home and caring for one another.

A group of people whose relationships don't fit neatly into any existing box.

Polyamorous people have very obvious reasons to care about this.

But we're hardly the only people who would benefit.

Single people benefit.

Aromantic people benefit.

Widowed people benefit.

People estranged from their biological families benefit.

Disabled people whose support networks don't resemble nuclear families benefit.

Anyone whose most important human connections don't happen to map neatly onto romantic partner = family benefits.

Maybe the social challenge presented by polyamory isn't simply:

Please recognize that more than one romantic relationship can be legitimate.

Maybe it's:

Why have we attached so much adult legitimacy to romantic relationships in the first place?

Visibility Isn't Something We Owe

There's another piece of the social-acceptance conversation I don't want to ignore.

Research suggests that knowing someone who is polyamorous is associated with lower mononormative attitudes and greater support for polyamorous legal rights.

Visibility matters.

People are often less frightened by something once "polyamorous people" stops being an abstract category and starts meaning someone they actually know and care about.

But visibility has a cost.

Being openly polyamorous can still affect family relationships, employment, housing, custody, community standing, and personal safety.

So I don't think individual polyamorous people owe society their visibility just because visibility might eventually make society more accepting.

Nobody owes the movement their closet door.

That, too, is part of letting people decide what their relationships mean and who gets access to them.

Maybe We Should Just Let People Care for Each Other

I don't think everyone should be polyamorous.

I don't think romantic relationships are unimportant.

I don't think marriage is inherently bad.

And I don't think every human relationship needs to be flattened into some perfectly equal network where nobody receives priority over anyone else.

That's not how human lives work.

I just think we've confused one common way of organizing care with the definition of care itself.

People love each other in all kinds of ways.

They build families.

They raise children.

They share homes.

They make commitments.

They show up during illness.

They sit beside hospital beds.

They pay bills.

They cook dinner.

They remember birthdays.

They answer the phone at 3 a.m.

They make room.

They stay.

Sometimes they're married.

Sometimes they're dating.

Sometimes they're related.

Sometimes they're friends.

Sometimes the relationship doesn't have a particularly useful name at all.

And maybe society doesn't need to know who is having sex with whom before deciding whether those relationships count.

Maybe polyamory's most interesting challenge to society isn't asking for more romantic relationships to be recognized.

Maybe it's asking why romance gets first dibs in the first place.

We'd probably all be better off if we could just fucking let people care for each other.

Perspectives Worth Reading

Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law — the philosophical work that introduced amatonormativity and argues for extending legal recognition beyond traditional romantic marriage to caring adult relationships.

Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law

Robin Dunbar and colleagues, The Social Network Effects of Romantic Relationships — research examining how entering a romantic relationship affects a person's existing close social network.

Gender Differences in Loneliness and Social Isolation Following Spousal Loss: A Systematic Review — a 2024 review of longitudinal research examining the different social consequences widowhood can have for men and women.

Gender Differences in Loneliness and Social Isolation Following Spousal Loss: A Systematic Review

Attitudes Toward Mononormativity and Polyamorous Legal Rights in the US — research examining American attitudes toward mononormativity and legal recognition, including the relationship between personally knowing polyamorous people and support for polyamorous rights.

Attitudes Toward Mononormativity and Polyamorous Legal Rights in the US