Perched on my bed in my lair – Holder entrance 8 – I watch as various bodies move in and out of my guest chair. I study them and I smile, actively not wishing these various bodies would get in bed with me. Hi guys! These bodies belong to my friends. One day they are wearing penny loafers, gladiator sandals another, sometimes velvet slippers, bubble clogs occasionally, post-pedicure foam flip flops just once but notably, Frye boots every now and then. I name their shoes because– and this is key– they will be keeping their shoes on. They will not be getting in bed with me.

In other news… my screen time is up. And I’m not sufficiently horrified by it. I should be horrified by it still, but at least I can say that the perpetrator isn’t the Instagram app nor some crush whom I am sending weird text messages to all day long. Actually, it’s precisely not that one. Day and night, I sit here, there, wherever, pointer and thumb pinching in, out, in, out on Find my Friends. Literally, all the time, all I want to do, is find my fucking friends. 

See, currently (right now), I am in love. And, simultaneously, I wish we’d shut up about romance a little more. 

I’ll explain. For the large part of my sentient, sapient career– granted, I’m two months shy of twenty-one so it’s been short– I was in love. I was in love in the way we usually mean by “in love.” I experienced an intoxicating, romantic “first love.” It was thrilling. I was consumed and distracted. Under its reign, what previously felt thrilling was demoted to “a fun time *smiley face*!” Luckily my existing best friends and family still love me despite my momentary hiatus from feeling thrilled by them, and really, how lucky is that! Because again, I promise, I’m now re-thrilled (by them). In the wake of that long adolescent relationship, I have taken somewhat of a vow to, well– not do that again. And I can feel myself falling delightfully in love with that which already existed, but I had previously deprived of my attention. 

My mother indulges these medium-interesting musings in her typically indulgent manner. She was born in New York in the 70s and had many friends and also boyfriends and it seems like the consensus back then– at least for straight women– was that romance was supreme. She is obsessed with this new façon d’être for me, obsessed with my saying “mom I’m in love” and not going on to describe the next boy who’s older than twenty, younger than twenty four, and drives too fast. She recently sent me this article. Now I’m obsessed with this article. Its central ideas are stored in my most frequently accessed mental library– On the shelf above them is everything Iris Apfel and Linda Rodin ever wore. Beside them is Francesco Risso’s Vogue apartment tour. Can’t tell you what’s below.

This article is part of the Ask Polly series, and its called I am So Bored. In the series, a hopeless romantic – writing under the moniker “Bored with Boredom”– asks “Polly” (columnist Heather Havrilesky) for advice. Her grievance is as follows: 

“I know that magic and novelty do not exclusively exist in romantic parameters, and I’m fed up with feeling like they do…. there is so much more that I find conceptually more exciting than romance and so many other types of love I’d rather be focusing on right now. And yet, the one thing that I have found chemically, epicly, dizzyingly thrilling is fleeting romantic connection.”

Relatable? Polly’s response is long, but I hope I’ve captured its essence:

“What separates an artist from a regular citizen is merely the determination to soak up the magic and novelty of everyday reality and experience it as sublime…Our fixation on romantic love does a grave disservice to the inherent romance of our lives… All you need is focus, patience, and belief in the romance that lives inside your cells.”

I have purposefully excluded specific elements of Polly’s answer, such as when she suggests that “cicadas in their chorus” can be oh-so romantic. (Mary Oliver honestly might have a spot in that mental library across from Apfel. But Oliver and romance? Meh. I like my dinner and dessert separately.) What I took from Polly’s answer was something along the lines of: Instead of waiting around passively–or worse, searching frantically– for romance, we ought to turn our focus to that which already is, and do our best to imbue it with the very magic we imagine romance will bring us. Polly does not focus specifically on friendship– she really implies that any and everything (even invasive insects!) can be made to feel like electric, thrilling life sources. I’m excited for that longer journey, but for now, I think I’ll focus on honing the effervescence of friendship. 

And to my great delight, I might just be in one of the best places ever to engage in that practice. If you’re reading this, you likely are too. Here we stand, at this age where we’re still kind of in our original nuclear units. Like, we’re our parents’ kids and our siblings’ siblings still more than we are any partner’s partner or kids’ parent (generally speaking). We have been partially untethered, and not yet retethered. In other words, this place is one big bachelor pad. For seven-ish months of the year, we’re here. And when we’re here, we exist as these independent entities among thousands of other independent entities– Thousands of others right there for our knowing, imagine!! We’re bachelors, units of one. This is something we might not be forever. In this position, we have the opportunity to do what we’d do on the TV show The Bachelor (I’ve never seen it but i’m assuming they have a lot of sex and talk about the sex they are having) but we also have the opportunity to form myriad pairings and clusters and blobs called friendships. The sheer scale and complexity of the people around us makes it hard to take it all in. And if anything makes it harder, it’s that we get so distracted by that one entity or a very small subset: subjects of our romantic interest. Some ludicrous hierarchy has been established, and in it, romance reigns. 

We all know that pact: If neither of us is married by forty, we’ll get married. 

It posits friendship as the backup plan. *Only* on the condition that both friends have not found love, the real kind, by forty, can they officiate, consummate, their mutual adoration. Friendship is the scrawny understudy to hot romantic love. If Idris Elba is busy, maybe Ryan Gosling will get a ring. But why?

Furthermore, in a world where romance and friendship coexist, the friends we do have become sounding boards for friends’ romantic grievances and advice– another wonderful thing about friendship. But there is always the danger that friends will start to feel like a Terrier next to a Saint Bernard, Oliver (Barry Keoghan)  next to Felix (Jacob Elordi) in Saltburn. (I don’t mean to declare once and for all that Jacob Elordi is obviously hotter, but its pretty clear the movie posits Keoghan as the comparative runt.) Hearing about their thrilling romantic love for the thousandth time, friend-A rues the days friend-B became so love-sick the two could no longer get through an hour without mention of lover du jour. I have been both friend-A and friend-B, and it sucks.

I am wary, as I write this, of suggesting that one has to fully banish romance in order for friendship to feel magical. Frankly, to imply this would be to concede that romantic love is, indeed, superior and will therefore trump platonic love anytime the two coexist. I definitely hope that isn’t true. And if it sounds like I am saying this, it’s only because I have not yet fully figured out how to have the two share space in a way where neither gets pushed out. Until we’ve cracked the code, though, I think it’s a good idea to turn our gazes a few degrees further in the direction of friendship— that’s all I’m saying. First of all, why not shake things up? Romantic love has had a long turn on centerstage. Second, we know– I know I do– that romantic love has the tendency to push out platonic love in its reign. By affording friendships a disproportionate amount of attention, and by actively meditating on them as sources of bliss and joy and thrill, perhaps this imbalance will be mitigated.

 Let us be bachelors who celebrate the status not just because of the romantic love we can pursue and obsess over, but also because we have the time and energy and guest chairs to dedicate to the many souls with whom we happen to share this very place at this very moment in time, because how thrilling is that?!