How Much Love Does It Take to Make One Boyfriend Irrelevant?

I thought one of the greatest achievements of my romantic life would be finding someone who made me feel completely secure. Someone whose bad mood wouldn’t send me examining our last six conversations for evidence. Someone I could call without first wondering whether I was being annoying, tell the ugliest version of a story without making myself sound reasonable, cry in front of without worrying that I had cried one time too many. I wanted the kind of love where I could finally put my bags down. For some reason, I had always pictured a man standing at the end of that feeling.

Then my relationship ended, and I found it everywhere.

It was almost embarrassingly obvious. It was in the friend who let me tell the same story so many times that even I started getting fuckingggggg bored of hearing it. It was in seven-minute voice notes sent with absolutely no apology for their length, phone calls that began with “Okay, I’m going to sound insane”, screenshots delivered without context because context had been accumulating for eight years. It was someone remembering the name of a person I mentioned once three months ago and immediately replying, “Oh fuck, HIM?” It was being allowed to change my mind halfway through the spiral and knowing nobody would hold yesterday’s version of me against today’s.

I think the strangest part was realising how little anxiety existed inside these relationships. I have never stared at a friend’s “okay” and wondered whether our friendship was ending. I have never gone home after dinner with someone I love and replayed the evening to determine whether I was interesting enough. I don’t worry that one badly timed joke will make my closest friends suddenly discover I am unbearable. I have been so fucking unbearable. They have extensive documentation but they stayed. There is an enormous freedom in being known beyond your most recent performance.

And God, my friends have seen some performances. They have watched me defend people I would later despise. They have watched me announce life-changing decisions and reverse them before the weekend. They have received selfies from trial rooms, photographs of suspicious text messages, screenshots zoomed into punctuation, voice notes recorded while crying and interrupted by me saying, “Wait, sorry, my Swiggy is here.” They have known me while I was funny and while I was deeply fucking boring. Friendship might be the only place where I have been allowed to be repetitive without becoming disposable, you know?

Maybe that is why heartbreak made me notice friendship differently. When one enormous source of love disappeared, I expected my life to feel emptied out. Instead, love became easier to see because I could no longer insist it had only one shape. It was somebody calling because they knew evenings were harder. Somebody saying come over without asking me to become cheerful first. Somebody remembering that a particular date might sting. Somebody hating a person temporarily on my behalf with almost comical loyalty, then gently telling me when I was being an idiot. None of these things looked like the love story I had been taught to wait for. They, however, felt suspiciously like the feeling I had been waiting for.

And these people had been loving me long before I noticed I was counting love incorrectly. They are all over my personality now. I say words I stole from friends whose names I haven’t said in years. My playlists contain somebody else’s recommendations. I order dishes another person made me try. There are clothes I wear because a friend once looked at me in a changing room and said, Are you fucking stupid? Buy it. Even my humour has multiple authors. We give romantic partners enormous credit for changing us, while friends spend years smuggling tiny pieces of themselves into us until we can no longer remember what belonged to whom.

I think this is why friendship can feel so secure, because, it rarely asks to be the whole house. One friend is who I call when my heart is broken. Another is who I want beside me when something wonderful happens. Someone knows my family history. Someone knows exactly what I mean from a single bro. Someone will sit beside me without requiring conversation. Nobody has to contain every version of me. I had spent years imagining one person arriving and becoming my great emotional home while completely missing the fact that I had built an entire fucking neighbourhood.

I still want romantic love. Very much. I want the stupid parts too, like, the hand reaching for mine under a table, somebody knowing what I want for dinner before I do, having one person to tell the microscopic details of a day that would bore everybody else to death. Friendship hasn’t made romance unnecessary. It has simply changed what I expect romance to rescue me from. I don’t need another person to prove that I am lovable anymore. There is too much evidence scattered around me. Some of it has known me for half my life.

I once read Dolly Alderton describe the possibility that when you cannot find love, perhaps it is because love is already there in abundance around you. I don’t know why that idea took me so long to understand. Maybe because we have made romantic love so enormous that every other kind is forced to stand beside it looking like an understudy. We ask single people whether they’ve “found someone” while they are surrounded by people who have found them again and again, through bad haircuts and bad decisions and grief and changing cities and entire discarded versions of themselves.

I think I spent years looking toward the door, waiting for love to walk in and make me feel safe. I didn’t realise how many people were already sitting on the floor beside me.

As soon as I publish this, I am going to send this link to my friends, so if you are my friend and reading this, I want to tell you that I LOVE YOU AND THANK YOU, really.