A few months ago, I was watching a TV show about two female best friends. At the end of one episode, they kiss. Apparently their love for each other had become something other than platonic.
I was pissed. It took me a couple of days to wrestle through why, because I could tell that my outrage was unrelated to the gender thing. I wasn't mad that they were surprise bisexual; I could tell it was something else that bothered me.
It's that I detest the best-friends-to-lovers trope. Like I cannot overstate to you how much I HATE that.
I had (misguidedly) assumed that I didn't have to worry about that trope with female best friends, so I felt blindsided/betrayed/bummed by the show. Like now I can't even safely enjoy best friendships between females in media.
Here's why I think I hate BFTL so much.
1) Best-friends-to-lovers devalues friendship. The trope makes it seem like the ULTIMATE stage of any relationship is romance. It makes relationships a hierarchy of strangers > acquaintances > friends > best friends > dating. Being best friends with someone is just the last stage before it "elevates" to also being romantic.
The AUDACITY. Lovers is a DIFFERENT type of relationship. It's not necessarily "BETTER." My relationship with Cassidy is no less meaningful, vital, healthy because it's not sexual. I didn't date anyone until I was eighteen years old, and I can tell you that every non-romantic relationship I had before that was better and more important than the romantic one, especially in the long run.
I resent fiction for conditioning the world to think that best-friendship is a lower category than romance, which leads me to Reason #2.
2) The relentless portrayal of BFTL in media distorts expectations in friendships, especially in opposite-sex friendships. For me, there was nothing worse than becoming close friends with a guy only to have him confess that he had romantic feelings for me*. As a Christian girl, I was taught to expect this; it's why opposite-sex friendships can be so "dangerous." As a thinking human, that offended me, and still does.
Telling a guy that I didn't want to become romantic with him was not an INSULT. In fact, it was usually the opposite. I've always felt that romance is temporary, whereas deep friendship is eternal. By declining to become romantic with guy friends, I felt like I was saying, "No, I'd rather love and trust you forever, rather than until we grow apart." For me, friendship and familyship (looking at my brothers: Aaron, Daniel, David) was so much more important, even intimate.
This kind of sounds like Reason #1b, so let me anchor it back into Reason #2: I feel like the relentless media portrayal of best-friends-to-lovers gave my guy friends unrealistic expectations about where our friendship was "going." The trope set them up for disappointment, and me for disillusionment. Guess they only cared about me until they found out they were never gonna kiss me. Cool.
3) BFTL is just cliché at this point. It is NEVER** the case that girl-guy best friendships stay that way in fiction. Even KIM POSSIBLE and LIZZIE McGUIRE went there in the end. STOP IT. Stop devaluing best-friendships by portraying them as the dissatisfying level before things get good. Stop writing predictable plots.
Here's my new philosophy: I think romance should be thought of as an add-on. Romance not a type of relationship; it's a quality of some relationships. If ALL you have is romance, you don't actually have a relationship of any type. You have to add romance to some type of relationship, and you get different things based on that equation. You can be strangers + romance (one-night stand), acquaintances + romance (friends with benefits), friends + romance (friends with benefits or dating), and best friends + romance (dating/engaged/married). Romance is not the highest type of relationship because it isn't a relationship at all; it's a quality.
Now, do I recommend being friends with someone before dating them? Yeah. Do I recommend dating your best friend? Maybe—but not NECESSARILY, and neither of you should be in a friendship or best-friendship only because maybe one day you'll get to sleep with each other. Gross.
So yeah. Glad I got this off my chest XD
~ Stephanie
* I know that for every one of these stories, there's the opposite side too: the poor guy who really liked a girl, got up the nerve to tell her, and got rejected. That is also really hard, and I'm sorry.
** I mean, I haven't seen everything in the world, so maybe not NEVER, but—okay wait, Little Women. And that goes over like a ton of bricks*** due to all the social conditioning. Sigh.
*** Okay tbh, I kinda do prefer Laurie to Professor Bhaer. Have I fallen victim to the very thing I want to destroy? Hm.
P.S. You may be wondering why this post has a crocodile as its photo. Well, I went to the free images site I use and typed in "mouth," because I was trying to get something related to kissing without getting something romantic. I saw this crocodile and I liked it, and it also fits with the blog's color scheme, so here we are.
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