Why Healthy Romances Depend on Healthy Friendships

I grew up hearing messages like "find one person to complete you" and "someday, you will find the one." Romantic love mattered most and other forms of love, especially platonic, were disposable. I have shared in my book, Platonic, research that called this love hierarchy into question. Assuming one person sufficiently completes us, I found, leads us to lose out on not just friendship but also romance.

Why can't one person complete us?

There are three types of loneliness, only one of which a spouse can fulfill: We experience intimate (desire for most intimate relationships, like a spouse or best friend), relational (desire for good friends), and collective (desire for a larger community working toward a common goal) loneliness distinctly. Because of this, we can be lonely even with the loves of our lives. We, truly, need an entire community to feel whole.

The functional specificity model is a clunky term for the idea that each type of relationship offers something different, and thus, no one relationship can fulfill all our needs. Its authors state, "relationships tend to become relatively specialized in the needs for which they provide, and as a result, individuals require a number of different relationships for well-being." This idea is backed by a study on emotionships, which finds that we experience higher well-being when we turn to different people to help us work through different emotions. Other research finds people who rely on various people for support (spouse, child, friend) experience a better quality of life.

Why are friends important to healthy romance?

We need to feel connected to function; when we're disconnected, according to research, it hinders our sleep and mental and physical health. If we only rely on a spouse for connection, then the health of that relationship disproportionately determines our health. Normal fluctuations in that relationship, then, can be devastating. For example, one study found that people enduring marital conflict released stress hormones in a maladaptive pattern unless they had quality connections outside the marriage.

According to the substitution hypothesis, when we feel disconnected in one relationship, we naturally seek to maintain belonging by seeking connection in another. According to researchers, "feelings of connectedness in other relationships can compensate for fluctuations in feelings of connectedness with one’s romantic partner."

Having friends can make us resilient to marital stress because our other relationships help us maintain homeostasis. When we are resilient to strife with our spouse, this not only benefits us but also our spouse. Spouses' mental health is intertwined, given research that when one person's happiness changes, their spouse's tends to as well. If friends make our spouses happy, their happiness will benefit us. Supporting this, the more people interacted with friends, one study found, the less depressed not only they were, but also their spouses.

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