“Omfg my dad just asked if we were dating.”

The message, which followed a string of crying emojis, flickered onto the screen of my iPhone as I sat at a stoplight on my way home from my friend’s house. While there, we had sat on her couch under a blanket watching a Netflix documentary. We had shared in laughs, gossip, and commentary, but there was no reason to presume intimacy between us, except for that I am a man, and she is a woman.

This presumption is not new to me. As someone who predominantly surrounds myself with female friends, the extent of my friendships has always been scrutinized. The idea that a boy and a girl can simply be friends is perplexing to our society.

“I was like, uh, well, he's gay, dad,” my friend said she responded.

Since coming out as queer, my sexual orientation has exempted me from assumed relationships with my female friends. Though valid, the response suggests that the only reason we are not dating is because I identify as gay—as if in an alternate universe in which I were straight, the narrative would be different. Often, we do not realize that we are scripted into espousing heteronormativity even when we try to avoid it.

In schools, rhymes circulate about boys and girls from different planets. Though seemingly harmless, they construct boys and girls as polarized beings. Parental influences further exacerbate this primitive assumption by heavily gendering their children’s lives. Sleepovers are segregated by gender to stunt budding sexualities. Cross-gender schoolyard bullying is excused as a signal of male affection. Parents gossip about their children’s “crushes” and “significant others” even when their children are at an age too early to understand the complexities of romantic relationships.

Heteronormativity is cyclical and often operates subconsciously. Because we are raised among these assumptions, we are liable to reproduce them. When the gendered demarcations we hold true become blurred, we automatically assume there must be a romantic or sexual interest between the two parties. Marriage is seen as the paragon of male-female relationships. All other forms of relationships are seen as subpar.

The hegemonic marriage narrative is vehemently perpetrated through all facets of society. In the media, opposite-gender leads often fall in love, regardless of the overall plot of the movie. We employ the term “friend zone” to categorize friends of the different genders who will never be of romantic interest. We say people are “just friends” as if being friends does not realize the full potential of a relationship. We assume a friends-with-benefits relationship will ultimately result in one partner, or both, “catching feelings” because we have a hard time fathoming sex without romantic undertones. By overemphasizing marriage, society ultimately devalues friendships.

The devaluation of friendships extends beyond straight people. By constantly, automatically assuming that male-female friendships are relationships, we assume that heterosexuality is the norm, and anything deviating is abnormal. While I knew I was gay from a young age, the internalized homophobia this type of thinking breeds stunted my coming-out process. It delayed my coming out by multiple years because thinking in terms of heterosexual structures was (and largely remains) ingrained in me as a byproduct of my socialization.

Though identifying as LGBTQ+ may seemingly exempt people from the assumptions we make about relationships, queer people are actually typed into a modified version of the relationship norms that police straight people. As with straight people, the media plays a large role in perpetuating this assumption. Movies with same-sex gay leads rarely resolve without the leads falling in love. Following the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015, many openly gay people of the same gender are now assumed to be in romantic relationships. As with straight people, we have a hard time looking at two queer people without scripting them onto a pathway to marriage.

The marriage model is also extremely exclusionary to those who identify as non-binary or gender non-conforming. Because contemporary understandings of marriage rely so heavily upon the heterosexual (and, more recently, same-sex) couplings, non-binary people can often be forgotten from the narrative and impact of this issue altogether, or they can be typed into cisgender roles that do not reflect their true gender identity.

Our strong emphasis on marriage results in a reduced social importance of friendships with those of the preferred gender. By treating marriage as life’s ultimate goal, society stunts the networks and the learning possible through interpersonal interactions. By treating boys and girls as separate entities at a young age, before questions of sexuality arise, we allow for gendered behavior to become cyclical and subconscious. For example, by excusing boys who tease and bully girls on the playground as “having a crush,” we allow boys to grow up thinking that they can disrespect female bodies and use affection as a scapegoat rather than being respectful of boundaries and responsible for their behavior. Typing behaviors and friendships as romantic is not only pervasive but dangerous.

We live in a world that tells us boys should befriend boys and girls should befriend girls. But by diminishing the value of friendships between boys and girls, we stunt the learning that can be done from befriending those with different experiences and identities. What’s more, not everyone wants to marry, so we should avoid trying to fit everyone into that narrative.

Elijah T. Ezeji-Okoye '20, a Crimson Editorial Comp Director, is a Sociology concentrator in Lowell House.