Do you know how long it takes to make a friend?
In her novel All About Love, bell hooks writes that as children, we learn how to love first from our familial relationships, and then from our friends, which enables us to experience romantic relationships as we age. However, by the time we reach high school and teenage years, our social environment has restructured to prioritize romantic relationships as the most important and satisfactory. It is a value we learn over time, trained into us by media, movies, and social interactions.
Don’t believe me?
Name a classic Disney Princess movie (except Moana) in which the main character makes friends instead of finding a partner.
When Harry Met Sally is a movie that takes this even further: one main character states sardonically that men and women can never just be friends… and then the movie proves this point, when the entire plot centers around the two friends (spoiler alert) eventually becoming a couple.
For more evidence, just Google “best movies about friendship,” or “teen friendship movies”. Some of the top results include Mean Girls, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, etc. While these movies do feature friend groups or friendly relationships, much of the conflict in the story revolves around a romantic relationship: often where one character betrays a friend in order to have a romantic partner.
Media also often depicts these friendships as secondary and shallow in comparison to romantic drama. Conversations between friends in movies and TV is most commonly about romantic relationships. For example, in the hit show Sex And the City, the four female main characters are “best friends,” but much of the plot centers, arguably, on the women’s relationships and the male boyfriends, partners, or boytoys in their lives, rather than on building genuine, strong female relationships. The women are shown to have almost no interests or traits outside of shopping, jogging, brunching and drinking, (during which they always discuss men). Although the show claims to be about four best friends, very little of the plot is dedicated to building their bonds and strong relationships without mentioning boyfriends.
Grey’s Anatomy features Merideth and her various romantic conflicts, as well as the other characters’ romantic entanglements, while portraying the friendships between the doctors and roommates as a kind of side-story constant that doesn’t require much effort to maintain and seems to be a “friendship”based on only two commonalities: being doctors, and helping each other with romance.
While this may not seem like a big deal, it can certainly help explain why teenagers as a group prioritize romantic relationships over their friends.
Our society also preaches through the media that if you don’t have a partner, you must have a lot of friendships in order to be happy. However, these societal perceptions undercut the value of true, platonic love. For many individuals (whether you identify as aromantic, demiromantic, or simply feel underwhelmed by the choices for romantic partners in high school) the romantic relationship may not be the most satisfactory or important. And teenagers as a group need to recognize two things: we are not Carrie Bradshaw, and that friendships take just as much effort to maintain and build as a romantic relationship does. If we begin to prioritize our friends with the same time, effort, and energy that the media tells us to put into our romantic relationships / entanglements, we may truly make meaningful friends.
In a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, researchers found that “it takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from mere acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to go from that stage to simple ‘friend’ status and more than 200 hours before you can consider someone your close friend.”
It seems we as a society need to rethink the outdated idea that the goal of high school is to find a romantic partner. Perhaps, our goal should be to form a handful of close, meaningful relationships – of any kind – instead.
