On Platonormativity and the Fragility of Platonicism
In our society, people often assume a relationship exists just because two people talk more than once. If you push back on that assumption, the reaction can be disproportionate and include confusion, hurt, or even rejection. I find this to be a bizarre phenomenon. The thing is, I’m not talking about romantic or sexual relationships - I’m talking about platonic relationships. I’m talking about platonormativity, the idea that the human societal norm is to form friendships with one another and that all humans experience platonic attraction in order to pursue those friendships.
This is where this kind of normativity falls apart: We never call someone our partner, our lover, or our sweetheart just because we have regular conversations outside of work, and we certainly don’t assume someone is a sexual partner for the same reason. But why is it that friendship is always the default when there is even a sliver of closeness between two individuals? Why is it that when two people talk about their lives in a meaningful way to one another, with no romantic or sexual feelings shared between them, there is some kind of unspoken rule that there is a third type of attraction happening? It’s because of platonormativity.
This is something I’ve always struggled with for the entirety of my adulthood and most of my teenage years as well. Of course, I’d had friends before, and even had a best friend or two. But for me, friendship was always meticulously curated. If someone wanted to be my friend, they couldn’t just say to me “Hey, we’re in the same class and talk about our passions a lot. I guess we’re friends now.” That’s the kind of thing that would turn me off from any kind of connection with the person. I prefer a conversation where we both sit down and talk about our feelings, what we want from a friendship, and why we want it. I find it incredibly strange that so few people treat friendships in this way, that they see friendship as something deep that requires mutual agreement and trust in order to work.
The social system of friendship is fragile and fickle. Let’s say someone talks to you every day at your job and eventually the two of you end up having a lot of similar interests, so you plan to hang out at their house or your house or your favorite coffee shop. You have a lot of fun and decide to make this get-together a weekly thing. But now, this person is calling you their friend and has decided that you’re in a friendship with them. In most circumstances, if you were to say “I don’t think that I see you as a friend, actually”, what would happen? The most likely scenario is that this person would be very hurt. But unlike a romantic or sexual relationship (or one that is presumed to be such), the entire connection with this person seems to fall away when you reject their friendship. To them, friendship is the baseline to any kind of human closeness and if you don’t have that, then you’re just strangers. If you’re not friends with someone for long enough, they just drift away.
That’s the problem with all of this, that friendship is the default that two people should strive for and it seems to be a structurally enforced concept. I mean, you can just look at platforms like Facebook and see that “Friends” is the name of the type of connection you make even with strangers, acquaintances, or the occasional “That barista was super cool and queer so I’ll hit hir up on Facebook sometime.” It’s always “add me as a friend on Facebook” and “I have 300 friends on Facebook and I’ve only met a few of them in person.” There doesn’t seem to be any deep meaning to the word “friend” in these contexts.
Friendship is such a deeply ingrained concept in society that when you bring up the idea that you don’t feel that type of attraction, people think that something is severely wrong with you and assume there is some kind of antisocial mental health problem involved. When you reject someone’s sexual or romantic advances, it hurts them. When you reject their platonic advances, they think you don’t want to associate with them.
That’s what I mean when I say that friendship is a fragile concept, because it’s treated as the end goal of most close interactions with others rather than another deeper type of relationship we choose to pursue if we feel comfortable, and it’s seen as strange not to want it at all. Think of how many times someone has said that they’re no longer friends with someone as a way to say that they are no longer in contact with them. Friendship is more than just a neutral baseline of a label - it’s also socially enforced or else we lose the people we’ve been establishing these connections with.
The concept of “best friends” is a whole other can of worms, enforcing a hierarchy within an already faulty structure, but that’s the closest thing I can compare to what I look for in a friendship - a deep and special connection with one person, not just a “friend” who is a drinking buddy on the weekends in the same way that my coworkers have friends. When I look for friendship, I’m looking for closeness, and I want someone I can really spend time building myself around. The ideal scenario is one where I can take my time cultivating a bond with them. But for many people, “best friend” literally means the closest friend they have out of many, and those more casual friends are simply people they know rather than people they’ve established an open and trusting relationship with.
Friendship takes emotional labor just like any other type of relationship, so it’s something that I always want to treat delicately and take my time with. But never in my life have I ever found someone who thinks the same way as I do about friendships and platonic attraction, which is very isolating. There’s a certain almost caricature-esque image people have of others who don’t have any friends - lonely, basement-dwelling, weird, antisocial, maybe even standoffish. People have certainly thought that way about me before. But the isolation doesn’t come from not having any friends, it comes from not having anyone in my life who understands how I feel. To them, I’m just bad at making connections with people, and somehow it’s my fault that I’m bored and lonely and don’t have anyone to talk to.
Don’t get me wrong, this essay is not a declaration of how much I dislike the idea of friendship and how much I struggle with making them possible, though this is a very real thing I experience in my day to day life. The point of this is to highlight the faults in a system where a certain type of attraction and relationship are both expected by society to the point where it’s unheard of to even question this norm. It’s hard to navigate such a system as someone who lacks the capacity for platonic attraction, but I still do appreciate the kind of value friendships can bring to people’s lives, even my own.
Connections happen all over the attractional spectrum - strangers in passing who say hello, a quick shoulder to cry on when someone asks if I’m okay, acquaintances who know a little bit about my hobbies and interests. I can make these connections without calling them friendships and they can still be meaningful. These are not the type of people I would pursue a friendship with, but they’re people I would want to keep in my life because they provide a level of casual emotional closeness. Friendship is something different to me and I don’t always experience the platonic attraction necessary for being in one, and that’s simply how I experience closeness with others. Not every interaction I have with others needs to be a precursor to friendship nor do I need to have friendship in mind when having these interactions.
In an ideal world, we would value the moments we have with other people more than we value the labels we place on how we experience these moments. We wouldn’t need to see these types of relationships as a binary: A relationship where two people are approaching friendship versus a relationship where they’re actual friends - between these two binaries, it seems like friendship is always the goal in mind when seeking emotional closeness. For me, the connections I make are purely because I value smaller moments with others, not because I want to emotionally sustain long-term relationships between several people who call me their friend.
What I know for sure is that I don’t experience platonic love, ever, even when I do find myself in a platonic relationship. I don’t experience it, and I wouldn’t know how to express it if I did. Love is something I reserve for romantic relationships, and currently there is only one person I love. Platonic love is foreign to me and I would probably describe it as a repulsion by the concept. I’ve had a friend and an acquaintance both tell me at different times that they love me - since I’m a gay man and they’re both women, I know I didn’t misread the intent, but it definitely unsettled me. But, since platonormativity is ever-present, I could never find it in me to say something about it because I know I would have hurt them.
While I do feel out of place for being aplatonic because it’s such a misunderstood concept, I don’t feel weird for the aplatonicism itself. For the longest time, I didn’t know the right language for what I was experiencing and I had no idea who I could talk to about it. Of course, that “different” feeling I had toward friendships had been there for literal decades, but I just thought I was too shy, too awkward, too self-conscious for friendships and that I just had to try harder. With some poking around, I finally have a word for it, and I’m finally far more aware of how prevalent platonormativity is in our society.
Rejecting friendship doesn’t mean rejecting people, it means rejecting a system that limits connection by placing arbitrary labels on it. It means rejecting the idea that every kind of bond with someone else must reach the same level of emotional closeness in order to matter. Platonormativity teaches us that without friendship, there is nothing. My experience tells the opposite: There is already so much there, if we allow it, and we’re allowed to call our relationships what we want without having to follow any “rules.” Being aplatonic has helped me to realize that there is an autonomous quality to navigating those relationships and room for defiance against conformity.
