I remember it clearly: I was a high school junior staring at the blinking cursor on my college admissions application. “Tell us about a person who has had a profound impact on your life,” the essay prompt read. I assume the admissions committee expected me to write about my grandmother or, I don’t know, Mahatma Gandhi. However, I was compelled to write about my middle school best friend. By being authentically and bravely herself at such a young age, she helped me grow out of my paper-doll cutout puberty and into a more brazen adolescence. And that laid the foundation for who I hoped to become in college and beyond.
“You want to write about Rachael?” my mother asked, worried this was a flippant way to answer a serious question. But when she read my essay for errors, she shed tears. My mother cried, not only because I was lucky to have someone so powerful in my life, but because she knew her childhood best friend—more than any public figure, family member, or romantic partner—had deeply impacted her too. For both of us, the relationships we forged with our childhood besties would serve us well into adulthood: We would grow into who we were, partly because of the women we relied on while coming of age.
Almost 20 years later, I’m still thinking about Rachael. More specifically, I’m revisiting the idea that, when we prioritize friendships, our lives can change in substantial ways. Yes, most of us love our friends and enthusiastically show up for them. But cisheteronormativity, or the social conditioning that makes us think cisgender heterosexual relationship values are “the norm,” pushes us to value romantic partners—especially spouses—above all else.
It can be helpful to think of how cisheteronormativity feeds into our relationships as a relationship escalator, whereby societal messaging encourages you to date serially and monogamously until you meet the One. Friends support while you’re “on the hunt,” but then society expects you to hyper-focus on a singular, all-encompassing relationship. You move in, get married, have children—and as you ascend toward the creation of this prototypical family system, you might let other relationships (including deep friendships) fall away.
Pushing back against the relationship escalator takes a fair amount of introspection and intentional action. Enter: relationship anarchy, a phrase created by queer feminist thinker Andie Nordgren, meant to capture the philosophical idea that social rules should not limit our relationships.
In 2006, Nordgren published a pamphlet called The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy. It laid out several core tenets of the philosophy, including the idea that relationships—and their commitments—are customizable. They shouldn’t be based on any sense of entitlement (people don’t “owe” you anything), and you don’t need to rank romantic and platonic relationships. You can embrace nonmonogamy if you’d like, instead of hewing to the idea that you should only have one romantic partner
Overall, relationship anarchists place less emphasis on titles—like partner, sibling, parent, or friend—and more on the relationship’s significance. You’re not expected to prioritize your mother just by virtue of her being so. You’re not expected to live with a romantic interest over a platonic connection. Instead, you organize your life around the relationships that are most meaningful to you. (In fact, even using words like friend and partner here arguably flies in the face of the entire philosophy.)
“Relationship anarchy can allow for the room to create our own internal markers of success,” Sonalee Rashatwar, LCSW, tells SELF. And it can help us rely less on legitimizing our relationship choices through state-sanctioned approval (i.e., institutions like marriage), Rashatwar adds.
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