Remember Valentine’s Day in third grade? Bending and gluing pink and red construction paper into crude and hopeful mailboxes; careful attention paid to your tentative, loopy signature on cards intended for best friends; a crust of vanilla cupcake icing and cinnamon heart remains ringing the mouth of every kid in your class, who were all your special Valentine for this recess and maybe the next. On Valentine’s Day, back then, everyone was ostensibly in friend-love with everyone else.

It’s rare for adults to be as profligate with our love for each other. I mean, I’m not distributing Valentines to my pals, or at least not Valentines that aren’t jaded e-cards about hand-jobbing Rahm Emanuel. And yet, all is not lost. In adulthood, a much tighter and tougher version of the romantic friendship we celebrated as pre-sexual ankle-biters happens, in the form of girl crushes, bromances and platonic love affairs.

Romantic friendships require all of the focused care of a traditional romance, and related kinds of co-dependent intimacy and intensity. In a social context where fewer people get married, or get married young, and where more lose their relationship to divorce at some predictable point, the resulting emotional void demands the building and maintenance of magical pal-doms. I have maybe five romantic friendships among my first string. With them, my phone voice changes. They play with my hair. We are in love. Romantic friendships aren’t the same thing as regular, close friendships: my best ladyfriend and I aren’t at all romantic. We make fun of stuff on YouTube, play tennis and say goodbye by bumping fists, as detached and harmonious as adolescent next-door neighbours. My solid friendship with an ex-with-benefits isn’t romantic either, owing to our extreme competitiveness, mostly about our respective Jeopardy! prowess and the ongoing question of whether journalism or engineering is harder.

The collective, dreary absorption in getting laid means that the richness and radness of no-fucking friend-romances are usually undervalued, especially those between women. Girl crushes are often understood as precursors to lezzie stuff, even though most straight ladies grew up amid a close set of shrill, clutching girlfriends fed by a dramatic romance unfamiliar to most straight adult couples. Devotion to women-friends is a whole other thing when it’s felt by girls putting off babies and baby-daddies for a while longer. Although it’s sometimes maligned for its frattishness, bromance has of late gotten some kind of cred and been personified by reality douchemaster Brody Jenner, whose MTV show (yeah, Bromance) has men competing for his bud-ship. Outing man-love as a cool and appropriate thing is great, but I like bromance better when it’s about one unthreatened guy friend ironing the other one’s button-downs, just because, rather than glorifying wing-men.

Other non-relationship-romances exist, like the sudden, wild intimacy of a good one-night stand, where the shared and fleeting experience is apocalyptically, brilliantly romantic. So too with family relationships, the ones that transcend obligation and blood. One kind of romance doesn’t undermine another. My romantic friends and I are variously intertwined with external sex pals and wives and boyfriends and possibilities, none of whom negate the closeness we’ve established together. My best dude is both engaged and living overseas, but our particular emotional and intellectual convergence is as profound and rare as it is truly platonic, certainly more meaningful than it would be if we’d done it and then awkwarded around for the duration of knowing each other. Part of romantic friendship, and of adulthood, is respecting the arena. Shit is not to be fucked with.

Of course, “romance” has always meant something much different than sex. The power dynamic between couples and its crucial pains and pleasures aren’t relevant. Still, a friend romance involves its own sort of seduction, an ongoing courtship of attentions and affections. Fantasies involving your girl crush, bromance or platonic lover might involve lazy, happy road trips or how to spoil them on their birthday. They won’t be about the alarmingly provocative swoop of their ear’s helix, and how that might feel under your fingertips. The swoony, idealized version of romantic friends is for keeps; it can’t degenerate into domestic compromise like the other romance can.

Without the psychodrama of intercourse and its illicit allies, romantic friendships are freed up to allow for that sweet and necessary sort of physical affection, like lots of hugs and touches and, if you’re of that kind, kisses and cuddle marathons. The tacit agreement about how we relate can also mean using each other as audiences to play and flirt and act out. Ultimately, it’s just us with our grade school Valentine’s friends, redux. How great, in our screwy, complicated lives, to have something so good to be invested in and define ourselves by.

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