Friday morning, February 14th. The cafe is half-empty—most people are out buying flowers, making dinner reservations, performing the mandatory rituals of romantic devotion. The few who remain are either defiantly alone or pretending this day is like any other. Meanwhile, nobody's calling their friends to say "you matter to me." Nobody's celebrating the depth of sibling bonds or the sustaining power of long friendships. Those relationships are lovely, sure, but they're not important important. They're not romance. And on Valentine's Day, only romance counts. This hierarchy is arbitrary, destructive, and so deeply embedded we barely notice it.

The Thesis

We've constructed a hierarchy of human connection with romantic love at the apex, treating it as fundamentally more important, more real, more worthy of celebration and investment than any other form of relationship. This isn't natural or inevitable—it's a cultural choice that distorts how we value people and allocate our emotional energy. By treating romantic partnership as the only relationship that truly matters, we systematically devalue friendships, familial bonds, community ties, and chosen families. The result isn't stronger romantic relationships—it's impoverished relationships across the board, because we're asking one type of connection to bear weight it was never designed to carry while starving all our other bonds of the attention they need to thrive.

The hierarchy looks like this:

  1. Romantic partner - The one that counts, the primary relationship, your "other half"
  2. Children (if you have them) - Important but expected to be subsidiary to romance
  3. Immediate family - Obligatory but often burdensome
  4. Close friends - Nice to have but ultimately secondary
  5. Extended network - Barely registers as meaningful
  6. Community, colleagues, acquaintances - Functionally irrelevant

This ordering feels natural because it's everywhere. It's embedded in our language ("my better half"), our social structures (tax benefits for marriage), our life scripts (find a partner, settle down), and our celebrations (Valentine's Day exists, but no equivalent for friendship).

But it's a choice. And it's doing damage.

Why the Hierarchy Fails

It makes romantic relationships brittle:

When romantic partnership is supposed to meet all your needs—emotional intimacy, intellectual stimulation, physical affection, companionship, support, validation, entertainment—it can't possibly succeed.

No single person can be everything to you. Expecting them to is unfair to both of you. But when we've devalued every other relationship, we have nowhere else to turn. So we demand more from romance than any relationship can sustainably provide.

Then when it inevitably fails to be enough, we don't question the hierarchy. We question the relationship. We break up and look for someone who will finally complete us. The pattern repeats.

The irony: the cultures with the strongest non-romantic relationships often have the most stable romantic ones, because there's less pressure on any single bond to be everything.

It poisons friendships:

Friendships are treated as transitional. They're what you have before you find your person. Once you're partnered, friends become secondary—people you see when your partner is busy, relationships you maintain out of loyalty but no longer prioritize.

We accept this as normal. When friends get into serious relationships, we expect them to disappear. When they get married, we don't even expect invitations to see them one-on-one anymore. "They have their own life now."

This message is corrosive: you don't really matter. You were filler, not foundation. Real relationships are romantic. Everything else is optional.

People internalize this. They invest less in friendships because they know those friendships will be abandoned the moment someone finds a romantic partner. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of shallow connections.

It creates existential fragility:

If romantic partnership is the only relationship that truly matters, then being single is an emergency. Not a neutral state or even an undesirable but tolerable one—an active crisis requiring immediate remedy.

This desperation makes people stay in bad relationships longer than they should. Makes them lower their standards to avoid being alone. Makes them feel like failures when relationships end.

Worse, it makes people's entire sense of worth contingent on one relationship status. You're incomplete without a partner. You're somehow less adult, less successful, less arrived. Your life hasn't really started yet.

This is insane. And it's maintained by the hierarchy that says romantic love is the only kind that really counts.

It renders people replaceable:

When romantic partnership is elevated above all else, partners become somewhat fungible. The role matters more than the person.

You need a partner. You need to be partnered. The specific person is obviously important, but often less important than filling the slot. How many relationships are really about this person being uniquely irreplaceable versus them being a satisfactory candidate for the partner role?

Meanwhile, friendships—which often are about irreplaceability, about this specific person being themselves in a way no one else is—are treated as disposable because they're not the relationship that counts.

The wrong things are prioritized.

What Actually Works

Recognize relationships as a portfolio, not a hierarchy:

You need multiple types of connection, none inherently more valuable than others. Different relationships serve different needs, and that's good.

  • Romantic partnership: Intimacy, partnership, physical connection
  • Close friendships: Deep understanding, shared history, chosen family
  • Family: Belonging, roots, generational perspective
  • Community: Broader purpose, contribution, context
  • Weak ties: Diversity of thought, serendipity, expansion

None is a substitute for the others. All are necessary. When you try to get everything from one source, you impoverish yourself.

Invest proportionally to value, not status:

Some friendships might be more important to you than romantic partnership. Some familial relationships might be more sustaining than either. Some community connections might be more central to your identity than any individual relationship.

That's fine. That's healthy. It doesn't mean you value romance less—it means you're not artificially elevating it above relationships that matter more to you specifically.

Stop investing based on what the hierarchy says should matter and start investing based on what actually matters in your life.

Celebrate non-romantic love publicly:

We have Valentine's Day for romantic love. We need equivalent celebrations for friendship, chosen family, community bonds, mentorship, sibling relationships, long-term partnerships of all kinds.

Not as consolation prizes for people who aren't partnered. As genuine recognition that these relationships deserve celebration, investment, and public acknowledgment of their importance.

Make time. Make plans. Make gestures. Make it clear: this relationship matters, not because it's leading to romance but because it's valuable in itself.

Let romantic relationships breathe:

When you have a robust network of deep connections, romantic partnership can be what it's actually good at being—intimate partnership with one person—instead of being forced to be everything.

Your partner doesn't need to be your best friend, your therapist, your activity buddy, your intellectual sparring partner, your emotional support system, and your entire social life. They can be your partner, and that's enough.

This doesn't weaken romance. It strengthens it by removing impossible expectations and letting it be one valuable connection among many valuable connections.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Valentine's Day isn't a celebration of love. It's a celebration of one very specific type of love, elevated to the exclusion of all others.

If you have a romantic partner, today you're supposed to prove they matter through ritualized gift-giving and mandatory expressions of devotion. If you don't, today is a reminder that you lack the one relationship that supposedly matters most.

Both messages are poison.

Here's what you should actually do:

  • On Valentine's Day: Reach out to someone who matters to you, romantically involved or not, and tell them they're important
  • This week: Examine which relationships you're underinvesting in because they don't fit the hierarchy
  • This month: Schedule time with friends or family with the same intentionality you'd plan a date
  • This year: Build a life where your wellbeing depends on a network of strong connections, not on any single relationship being everything

Stop letting the hierarchy dictate where you put your energy. Start building the connection portfolio that actually serves your life.

The strength of your relationships isn't determined by their place in some arbitrary hierarchy. It's determined by the attention, care, and investment you choose to give them.

Romantic love is wonderful. So is platonic love, familial love, chosen family, deep friendship, sustained partnership, community belonging, and all the other ways humans connect.

Stop ranking them. Start investing in all of them.

Today's Sketch

February 14, 2026