My Friends Are Ruining My Love Life

Happy Valentine’s Day.

As I approach yet another February 14th single, and begrudgingly try to write a hinge prompt that carefully balances my intelligence and subtle sense of humour, I find myself reflecting on why I’m finding it so hard to fall in love.

After extensive self-analysis (and absolutely no denial), I have decided that this has nothing to do with me, my attachment style, or my dating history.

No, no. 

The responsibility lies squarely with my friends.

The rumours are true. My friends are ruining my love life.

My friends fill my life with so much love that I cannot see where another person would fit. This feels dramatic, but one thing about me is, I love a bit of drama. “Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt from my long-term friendships with women.” I didn’t write that, Dolly Alderton did but since nabbing Everything I Know About Love from my sister’s bookshelf in 2019, it is a quote that has stuck with me, and feels true to my life. The book begins as a jumble of romantic chaos, but what settles is the sustaining love of friendship, that outlasts any romantic engagements.

I am 27. And the love I know most intimately is not candlelit. It is communal, chaotic, generous, and loud. It is my friends, and it is really hard to date when your friends are the best. 

Let me ask you a question… would you rather spend a night with a stranger or your best friend? 

My friends send me cards and flowers when I’m having a hard time. They make me personalised notes containing affirmations that I stick on my wall and read when I wake up. They sit on the toilet while I shower and discuss life’s biggest questions like: ‘I wonder what really happened to the Beckhams.’ They tell me to shut up when I need to shut up. We share a Splitwise account like an old married couple with mild financial anxiety. We can talk for hours. They know my quirks and they love me anyway. And you know what they say, to be loved is to be understood. 

I once heard one of my friends describe one of our other friends like this: “she’s like one of those magical girls out of a 90s movie, you know the mysterious one that everyone is in awe of…” 

I have literally never heard a date talk about me like that!

In Communion: The Female Search for Love, bell hooks writes, “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” Romantic culture tells us this risk is reserved for partners. But friendship can be just as vulnerable. And despite discourse shifting in recent years to value platonic love more, and the idea of having a partner becoming ‘embarrassing’  (thanks for that Vogue), we rarely centre our friendships as the primary love story of our lives. There is still so much pressure for our generation to search for stability in romance.

My issue is, when your baseline for intimacy is being known by friends who can read your micro-expressions and understand what you mean when you’re not saying anything at all, it is hard to be impressed by a guy from Byers Road who can ‘split the G’ or a person who scored a hattrick at their football tournament on Sunday morning. 

It’s not that I expect a date to perform miracles, and I’m really not that hard to impress. It’s just that my friends have shown me what I think love should be, and I’m not willing to lower my bar just because society says that I should in pursuit of romance.

Now, you might be wondering why a blog about me being single has found its way onto Flos Collective’s page about art-making and community. But to love your friends loudly and proudly, to prioritise them, to feel joy in them that rivals romantic love, and mean it, is radical. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay reminds us that feminism is about making space for contradiction, and the lives we actually live. My life is structured around friendship. It is collaborative and emotionally articulate, and in many ways we have built Flos Collective around this ideal. 

To be clear, I am not saying I don’t want romance. In fact, I would love to fall in love with someone. I guess that what I’m attempting to articulate is that romantic love doesn’t have to be the apex. As Natasha Lunn suggests in Conversations on Love, we need to find balance in order to live a satisfying life, and right now my scales are tipping so far on the side of friendship that they’re almost touching the floor. 

The truth is: I am scared. I am scared of someone coming in and shrinking this world I have built. Scared of cancelling a Twilight marathon for a date. Scared of the way heteronormative ideals can take priority: partner first, friends second. We’ve all been there - I have seen it happen and I have done it myself.

When your friendships are your greatest love story, romance can feel like a threat. But maybe that’s the wrong framing. In Everything I Know About Love, Alderton ultimately reframes the narrative: the enduring love is friendship. Romance may come and go, but friends remain with conversation, effort, and the luxury of understanding your history in a way that a new romantic partner can’t. 

So Are My Friends Ruining My Love Life?

Yes, yes they are. They have raised the bar. They have taught me that love is active. That love is someone to leave the party early with just to stay up laughing until 3am, or sitting by my hospital bed whilst I sleep. That love is having crazy ideas and creating ambitious things.

When I fall in love, and this time I mean the kind you really think of when I say love, it will not be because I lowered my expectations. It will be because someone met them, and found the blank pages in my love story to write themself in.

However, for now, I will spend my Valentine’s Day in a fancy London restaurant getting wined and dined by my best friends. We will be dressed to impress, talk about Bad Bunny’s half time show and at the end of our meal, when the bill arrives, I will add the amount to the splitwise we share. 

My cup will be full, and that is more than enough love for me.