“Love is blind, friendship closes its eyes.” Friedrich Nietzsche.
Riddle me this: What if we built our lives around friendship, rather than romantic partnership? What if, instead of assuming marriage or romantic coupling is the pinnacle of adult connection, we recognized the depth, endurance, and life-shaping power of platonic bonds, especially within the LGBTQ community?
For many queer people, this question isn’t theoretical. It reflects how long and well we’ve lived, loved, and survived. When the world excluded us from traditional paths to family — whether through law, culture, or rejection — we found each other.
These friendships often carry the same weight and meaning as romantic partnerships — and sometimes more. They last decades. They involve shared homes, finances, caregiving, and plans for aging. They are not consolation prizes for those who didn’t “settle down.” They are the settling down.
The evidence of friendship’s importance is everywhere. Research has shown that queer individuals, particularly those who are single, estranged from their families, or aging without children, rely on friends for emotional and practical support. A 2019 study found that LGBTQ people often turn to their friends first in times of crisis, not family, not romantic partners, but the people who’ve shown up consistently, year after year.
These friendships are not placeholders until something “real” comes along. They are real. They are foundational.
There’s also a quiet kind of resilience in centering our lives around friendship. Where romantic love can be explosive, volatile, or idealized, friendship is often steady, slow-burning, and rooted in shared history. It doesn’t always have a narrative arc. It simply is — a lived commitment, one check-in, one birthday party, one phone call at a time.
From my own experience, I’ve learned that some of the deepest connections in life come not from whom we’re with, but who we show up for — and who shows up for us. These friendships are forged in fire: through shared trauma, political struggle, identity formation, and the daily act of survival in a world that doesn’t always make room for us.
So what if we took friendship seriously, not just personally, but culturally? What if we created policies that reflected its significance? What if we wrote wills that included our best friends? What if we taught young people that having a friend who knows you inside and out is just as fulfilling, maybe more so, than finding a spouse?
What if we made friendship the cornerstone of our lives, not the background music?
In queer communities, we already know how. We’ve been doing it for decades. Our friendships have always mattered — often more than society was willing to admit.
A writer and media strategist, and lifelong resident of South Florida, Cliff Dunn is the former Executive Editor of the Florida Agenda newspaper, Mark magazine, and Guy Magazine.
