How "Relationship Anarchy" Can Help You Deepen Your Friendships

Good friendships are transformative

I remember it clearly: I was a high school student looking at the blinking cursor on my college admissions application. "Tell us about a person who has had a profound impact on your life," the essay message read. I guess the admissions committee expected me to write about my grandmother or, I don't know, about Mahatma Gandhi. However, I was forced to write about my best friend from high school. By being authentically and courageously herself at such a young age, she helped me get through my puberty of paper doll cutouts and into a more cheeky adolescence. And that laid the foundation for what I hoped to become in college and beyond.

Do you want to write about Rachael?* my mother asked, worried that this was a frivolous way to answer a serious question. But when she read my essay for mistakes, she cried. My mother cried, not only because I was fortunate to have someone so powerful in my life, but because she knew that her childhood best friend, more than any public figure, family member, or romantic partner, had also deeply impacted her. . For both of us, the relationships we forged with our childhood best friends would serve us well in adulthood - we would become who we were, in part because of the women we trust as we come of age.

Almost 20 years later, I still think about Rachael. More specifically, I am reviewing the idea that when we prioritize friendships, our lives can change substantially. Yes, most of us love our friends and enthusiastically introduce them. But cisheteronormativity, or social conditioning that makes us think that the values ​​of cisgender heterosexual relationships are "the norm," pushes us to value romantic partners, especially spouses, above all else.

It can be helpful to think of how cisheteronormativity feeds into our relationships as a relationship escalator, whereby social messages encourage you to date serially and monogamously until you meet the One. Friends support you while you're "on the hunt," but then society expects you to focus too much on a singular, all-encompassing relationship. You move, get married, have kids, and as you work your way up to creating this prototypical family system, you can let other relationships (including deep friendships) fade away.

Rolling back the relationship escalator requires a fair amount of introspection and intentional action. Enter: Relationship Anarchy, a phrase created by queer feminist thinker Andie Nordgren, intended to capture the philosophical idea that social rules should not limit our relationships.

In 2006, Nordgren published a pamphlet titled The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy. She established several basic principles of philosophy, including the idea that relationships and their commitments are customizable. They should not be based on any sense of entitlement (people do not "owe" you anything), and there is no need to classify romantic and platonic relationships. You can embrace non-monogamy if you want, rather than accept the idea that you should only have one romantic partner

In general, relationship anarchists place less emphasis on titles, such as partner, brother, father, or friend, and more on the meaning of the relationship. You are not expected to prioritize your mother just because she is. You are not expected to live with a romantic interest in a platonic connection. Instead, organize your life around the relationships that are most meaningful to you. (In fact, even the use of words like friend and partner here could be said to go against all philosophy.)

"Anarchy in relationships can allow the room to create our own internal markers of success," Sonalee Rashatwar, LCSW, tells SELF. And it can help us become less reliant on legitimizing our relationship options through state-sanctioned approval (that is, institutions like marriage), Rashatwar adds.

For Dan L., 29, relationship anarchy was not an intentional path. Despite meeting the Chosen One in college and getting married at 21, they felt dissatisfied. Dan, who identifies as a fat, queer, gender fluid, and neuro-divergent Chicanx person, found that traditional relationship structures were limiting. I always assumed that my constant discontent within the cisternormative relationships was a reflection of my inherent wrongness, they tell SELF. It didn't immediately occur to Dan that the problem might lie with the rigid rules imposed by society.

Dan met other queer people who were reinventing the rules of relationships and embarked on an inside job to discover what they really wanted, and that was a deep community connection. We always hear 'It takes a village' when it comes to raising a child, says Dan. "But I never see people celebrating the commitment and trust of a lifelong friendship.

Relationship anarchy may seem different to everyone, but it involves re-evaluating and restructuring relationships based on people's individual (and collective) needs. For Dan, relational anarchy centers on self-determination. It involves co-building and maintaining structures that support and empower each person to assert their own autonomy at all times, they say. For example, Dan creates a space in his friendships for people to ask for what they need and a space for people to say no "for any reason at any time.

“It felt like taking an air mattress out of the box,” Dan says of leaving traditional relationship models behind. "There's no way we're going to put that thing back in there."

In my own life, I have moved away from engaging in relationships in ways that focus on monogamy, cisheteronormativity, and nuclear family systems. Instead, I allow relationships to grow organically and prioritize them because of how meaningful they are to my (and the other person's) growth.

I practice polyamory, recognizing how unexamined monogamy can be harmful and limiting. By deprioritizing cis men in my life, I challenge the patriarchal notion that, as a woman, my role is to serve men. And I place friendships where they belong for me, front and center, giving women, mostly queer women and women, the most gravitational pull in my orbit. I try to present myself with the same fervor and dedication to everyone around me, with radical honesty and celebrations of authenticity. Sometimes that seems to have intense late-night conversations about the state of our relationships, regardless of platonic or romantic intimacy. Sometimes it's as simple as buying friends and associates equally amazing birthday gifts. The idea is: I allow the light in my life to be as vast as it is bright. I give myself permission to love without inhibitions.

A multi-faceted system will always be more supportive than a single approach. And emphasizing non-romantic relationships can only help us live more fully, especially as different people illuminate unique parts of ourselves. Rashatwar says that having deep and intimate friendships in adulthood can help us integrate our adult selves and the child, leading us to ease old psychological pains. Dan agrees, stating that his emphasis on friendship and community "has allowed me to heal the wounds of shame" that came with the need for many different avenues for deep connection.

In a world where we often joke about how difficult it is to make and keep friends in adulthood, we should question the systems that breach those relationships in search of a unique, narrow, sometimes fleeting structure. And if we find ourselves craving friendships that feel like sleepovers in high school, we should create the space to have them.

I have been lucky enough to love and be loved deeply, to have had relationships of all kinds that changed my trajectory. And with relationship anarchy, I can participate more fully in the most meaningful connections with limitless abundance.

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