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Honoring Friendship Again — Love Without the Waiting Room

Somewhere along the way, friendship lost its place in our hierarchy of love. Once revered as one of life’s most sacred bonds — full of laughter, trust, grief, and growth — friendship has now become, in many people’s eyes, a placeholder. A liminal space. A waiting room for romance, or a fallback option if romantic attraction doesn’t materialize.

We are overdue for a return — to honoring friendship as a complete, beautiful, and fulfilling connection in its own right. One that does not need to lead anywhere to matter.

1. What Happened to Friendship?

In many cultures, including Kenya’s increasingly digital and performative spaces, emotional intimacy is now tightly bound to romance. If you're close to someone, especially of the opposite sex, it’s assumed there’s something more. We don’t trust people to love without agenda anymore.

This confusion is not accidental. A few cultural and technological forces have shifted the way we view connection:

  • Media saturation: Almost every movie, show, and song idealizes romantic love as the highest form of meaning.

  • Hyperfocus on relationships as life goals: In conversations, social media posts, and even motivational talks, there’s an underlying narrative that you haven’t “arrived” if you haven’t secured a partner.

  • Validation hunger: Many people feel unseen — and often turn to romance to be deeply known, rather than exploring the many other ways we can be witnessed.

  • Gender suspicion: There’s a deep mistrust of platonic connections, especially cross-gender ones. We assume either someone will “catch feelings,” or that they already have and are hiding it.

And so, friendship becomes either a disappointment or a detour.

2. Why Friendship Is Its Own Kind of Love

True friendship offers something radical in this world: love without possession. Here’s what it holds that we often overlook:

  • Freedom without expectation: Friends show up out of care, not duty. That makes their presence even more powerful.

  • Presence without performance: There’s no need to impress, seduce, or convince. You’re allowed to just be.

  • Emotional honesty: Friends can tell you the truth when everyone else is afraid to.

  • Non-linear commitment: Friendships aren’t built around milestones. They deepen through shared time, small acts, and mutual witnessing.

  • Quiet companionship: You can sit in silence and still feel seen.

When we reduce friendship to a stepping stone to romance, we miss out on this quieter, often deeper form of love.

3. The Loss We Don’t Talk About

When friendship is treated as a waiting room, several things break down:

  • Deep companionship becomes rare: People assume intimacy can only exist within romantic or family bonds.

  • Friendship ends when attraction doesn’t “progress”: Many beautiful connections are cut short because one person hoped for more, and the other didn’t.

  • Friendship is not grieved: When it ends, we don’t give it the same weight as a breakup — even if it leaves the same kind of ache.

Most tragically, we rob ourselves of a kind of love that isn’t built on desire — but on presence, care, and shared being. The world becomes lonelier for it.

4. Reclaiming the Sacredness of Friendship

What if we chose to treat friendship as an arrival — not a path toward something else? What if we allowed it to be deep, expansive, and emotionally satisfying — without apology?

Ways to begin:

  • Speak the love: Tell your friends they matter to you. Not in a coded or playful way — clearly, honestly.

  • Show up consistently: Text not just when you need something. Make time for one-on-one presence.

  • Create friendship rituals: A standing breakfast. A shared playlist. Letters. Micro-traditions build macro-meaning.

  • Let friendships be cross-gender: Stop assuming that intimacy always leads to romance or trouble. Make space for love without possession.

Friendship is not a lesser love. It’s just a quieter one. And it might be the one we need most right now.

5. Honoring Friendship in a Loud, Romantic World

We live in a culture that rewards visibility, romance, and spectacle. But the soul often needs something smaller, slower, and softer.

Friendship is that place. A place where you don’t have to be interesting, just interested. Where your value isn’t tied to attraction, performance, or output. Where you are met — not for what you could become, but for who you already are.

To restore friendship is to restore a world where people can be held — not just desired. Where presence matters more than progress. Where love doesn’t always have to look like a relationship to count.

Conclusion

Friendship is not the absence of something else. It is the presence of something whole. In a world that treats people as stepping stones to romance, success, or healing, true friendship says: you’re not a stop on the way — you’re the destination.

Let us honor it. Let us choose it. Let us live into it. 

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