Why True Friendships Are Essential to Love, Life, and the Soul of Our Communities

There are forms of love that announce themselves loudly. They arrive with ceremony, spectacle, and promise. They are toasted at weddings, immortalised in cinema, and endlessly dissected in books and podcasts. And then there are the quieter loves that rarely receive such reverence. The ones that do not shimmer with novelty but glow with endurance. The loves that show up in hospital waiting rooms, in late night phone calls, in text messages that begin with “Be honest with me” and end with prayer.

Friendship belongs to this latter category. Profound, formative, and often overlooked.

A recent conversation on Emma Grede’s podcast drew attention to precisely this neglect. The interview touched on how friendships are frequently taken for granted, assumed to be self sustaining rather than cultivated, enduring rather than deliberately protected. In a publishing industry saturated with advice about romantic compatibility, communication in marriage, and healing after breakups, there remains a striking scarcity of literature devoted to the lifelong maintenance of platonic bonds. We are fluent in the grammar of dating. We are far less articulate about the discipline of keeping friends.

This omission is not benign. It reflects a cultural hierarchy in which romantic partnership is positioned as the apex of intimacy, while friendship is treated as supporting cast rather than central plot. Yet for many women, particularly Black women navigating demanding professional and personal landscapes, friendship is not ancillary. It is structural. It is the framework that holds ambition, vulnerability, faith, and joy in place.

The Loneliness Beneath the Noise

We are living through a paradoxical era of social saturation and emotional scarcity. Never before have we been able to communicate with so many people so quickly, and yet never before have so many reported feeling profoundly alone. A loneliness pandemic has settled into everyday life, fuelled not by solitude itself but by the proliferation of surface level connection.

Acquaintances multiply with ease. Group chats swell. Social calendars appear full. Yet when crisis strikes, the number of people who can be called upon with complete candour often dwindles dramatically. Digital platforms reward visibility rather than vulnerability, proximity rather than presence. They train us to perform sociability without practising intimacy.

Compounding this is the rise of parasocial relationships, emotional attachments formed with people we encounter only through screens. Influencers, creators, and social media mutuals can feel familiar because they share fragments of their lives with candour and frequency. But familiarity is not reciprocity. These figures cannot interrogate our choices, comfort our grief, or challenge our distortions. They cannot hold our contradictions with tenderness.

Across platforms, countless videos circulate of people confessing that they have no close friends, or longing for community without knowing how to build it. The ache is visible. What is missing is instruction. Friendship is often imagined as effortless chemistry rather than a practice that requires initiative, emotional literacy, repair, and time. We mourn its absence while rarely discussing its architecture.

Galentine’s and the Reclamation of Platonic Love

In this cultural moment, the rapid embrace of Galentine’s feels less frivolous than prophetic. What was once dismissed as kitsch has become a site of reclamation. Women gathering to toast one another, exchange gifts, dress beautifully, and celebrate devotion outside of romance is a radical refusal of the idea that love culminates solely in couplehood.

Galentine’s is too often framed as a substitute for romantic fulfilment, a consolation for those temporarily unattached. That framing collapses under scrutiny. To honour friendship is not to reject romance. It is to refuse emotional monoculture.

Platonic love deserves ceremony precisely because it is enduring. Romantic relationships may wax and wane, but friendships often stretch across seasons of reinvention, relocations, marriages, divorces, promotions, and grief. Friends are the custodians of our becoming. They remember earlier versions of us and refuse to let us betray our future ones.

Strong friendships also refine our romantic lives. They teach us how to listen without defensiveness, how to argue without cruelty, how to apologise without ego. They offer perspective when infatuation clouds discernment and clarity when conflict distorts reality. A woman embedded in a community of trusted friends is less likely to collapse her entire emotional universe into one relationship. She enters partnership accompanied by wholeness rather than hunger.

Western culture, however, continues to privilege romantic attachment above all else. Many women recognise the familiar narrative. New relationship, vanished friend. Cancelled dinners. Radio silence. The slow evaporation of once sacred rituals. This withdrawal is rarely malicious. It is cultural conditioning. We are socialised to believe that devotion to a partner must come at the expense of other bonds, as though intimacy were a finite resource.

Yet women who sustain vibrant friendships do not love less deeply. They love more wisely.

Community Is Not Crowded

Community is frequently confused with abundance. A full contact list. A busy birthday dinner. A sea of faces at brunch. But true community is not measured numerically. It is measured relationally.

It is constituted by a handful of people who can speak into your life with authority because they have earned access to your interior world. People who will pray for you when words fail. Who will tell you, gently and directly, that you are staying too long in a relationship that no longer honours you. Who will rehearse salary negotiations with you at midnight, celebrate your promotion without envy, and sit beside you when success feels strangely hollow.

For professional Black women ascending corporate ladders, friendship often becomes both sanctuary and strategy room. These relationships hold space for ambition without apology and vulnerability without explanation. Friends function as witnesses to triumph and buffers against erosion. They decode hostile environments, validate intuition, and insist on rest when burnout masquerades as resilience.

Then there are the small sacraments of friendship. Shared book recommendations that crack open new worlds. Shopping trips that double as therapy sessions. Voice notes sent after difficult meetings. Scriptures exchanged quietly at dawn. Laughter so uncontrollable it resets the nervous system. None of this trends online. All of it sustains life.

Correction as Love

One of the most misunderstood elements of friendship is its refusal to flatter endlessly. Genuine friends are not yes men. They are guardians of your integrity. They notice when your standards slip. They interrupt self sabotage with inconvenient truth. They challenge narratives you use to excuse behaviour that no longer aligns with your values.

And still, they remain.

They correct privately and defend publicly. They hold your hand through the consequences of poor decisions and help you imagine better ones without shame. They cheer ferociously when you win and grieve with you when you lose. They know the sound of your bravado and the cadence of your fear, and they speak to both.

To be loved in this way is to be seen in high definition.

The Work of Choosing One Another

Perhaps friendships falter not because they lack depth, but because they lack ritual. We celebrate engagements with parties, marriages with processions, anniversaries with gifts. Rarely do we commemorate ten years of unwavering companionship. Rarely do we mark the friend who carried us through illness, unemployment, or heartbreak with the same grandeur reserved for romance.

Yet these relationships require equal intention. They demand maintenance, difficult conversations, forgiveness, scheduling, vulnerability, and recommitment. Friendship does not persist by accident. It survives because people decide, repeatedly, to keep choosing one another.

In an age defined by convenience and disposability, such commitment is countercultural. To cultivate a small circle of deep relationships is to resist the notion that people are replaceable. To invest in community is to reject the fantasy that independence means isolation.

The great love story of our era may not be singular. It may be collective.

It may be found in dining tables crowded with women who have watched one another evolve. In prayer circles and voice notes. In group chats that hold grief with gravity and joy with irreverence. In sisters who refuse to let one another disappear into romance, ambition, or despair.

Friendship is not ornamental. It is infrastructural.

It is the sacred architecture that holds a life upright.

And perhaps it is time we began honouring it with the language, reverence, and devotion it has always deserved.