Everyone wants to fall in love, but few are willing to fall in friendship.

We’ve been conditioned to value romantic love more than it deserves. We’ve been taught that romance is the supreme form of human connection—as if romance was an A-grade relationship type, while friendship was B-grade. I don’t like being the bearer of bad news, but I have to break it to you, my readers: We’ve been taught wrong.

Imagine if I held both my hands, palm open, in front of you. On one palm I carried 1 kg of iron, while on the other I told you there was 1 kilogram of cotton. Now, which one is heavier? (Don’t peek!)

And the answer, as it turns out, is… neither. The weight is exactly the same, but we’ve been tricked into thinking one is heavier. It’s all a game of perceptions. We tend to think a kilogram of iron is heavier than its equivalent weight in cotton, simply on grounds that we perceive iron to be heavier, and in the same way, we’ve been inculcated with the notion that romantic relationships are more important or valuable than friendships.

Another mistake we make is holding romance so high above friendship that we imagine it makes friendship redundant—like buying the flagship model of a car and thinking it automatically includes all the features of the cheaper ones. When, in fact, our romantic relationships are more comparable to a birthday cake. The mistake we make is imagining love as the cake itself, when in truth it is only the cherry on top. The real cake—the substance that nourishes us—is the friendship component of the romantic bond; it is the genuine human connection with someone who cares about our well-being. When we neglect the depth of that non-romantic bond, even with our romantic partners, we pay dearly. It’s like biting off the cherry, tossing aside the cake, and then wondering why we’re left hungry and unsatisfied. All this stems from our mistaken belief that romance is enough on its own, and that it is somehow more valuable—or ‘heavier’—than friendship. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

It’s not just the delusion of ranking romance above friendship that wrecks our relationships. We also rush into romance too quickly, without due diligence, like someone striding into the Empire State Building and expecting to be instantly teleported on the 80th floor without ever taking the lift or the stairs.

Allow me to offer another analogy to illustrate my point. Let’s imagine a construction project. At the basement gravel, sand, and other materials are laid to build a robust foundation; only then can the building rise to the first floor and beyond. Our relationships are no different: at the bottom lie gratitude, respect, and appreciation. When those are in place, we move to the first floor, where trust begins to welcome us inside their life. Only once we truly trust someone — and know that this trust rests on genuine gratitude and mutual respect — can unconditional love emerge. And when that happens, when we love someone for who they are, then, and only then, can romance flourish in earnest. I’ll repeat that last part because of how crucial it is: when we unconditionally love someone for who they are, then, and only then, can romance flourish in earnest.

This reminds me of a story of a young man and his girlfriend, both of whom were dissatisfied with their relationship. They were beginning to feel that the spark they’d initially felt when they met was fading away. “It feels like we’re losing our appetite to be with each other,” the young man had complained to one of his friends.

Soon their relationship problems became so bad, they decided to go to therapy, sought advice from councillors, their parents, and even their friends. But no matter what they did, nothing seemed to work.

During a conversation with one of their mutual friends, they got a suggestion.

“There is this wise sage my grandfather knew. He always used to praise him and kept saying this man had some of the deepest wisdom my grandpa had ever heard. There was no problem he couldn’t help find a solution to. Maybe you should consult him. Got nothing to lose, you know.”

The couple weren’t sure about it at first, but then realised that after months of a dysfunctional relationship, perhaps they should pay him a visit.

Upon asking them a few questions, the sage learned that the two had met around a year before, and have been in a relationship ever since.

“So, you were never friends?” asked the wise sage.

“No. We entered a relationship shortly after we first met,” the young girl answered.

The sage paused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, before replying.

“Tell me, young man, young woman, would you go to a restaurant and order the dessert before the main dish?”

With a curious confusion, the young couple looked at each other, then back at the sage. “No, because the dessert only makes sense after we’ve finished our dinner,” the young woman replied.

“Precisely,” the sage responded. “And our problem with dating is even worse. We drool at the dessert before we've even touched the appetizer. We fill our emotional emptiness with romance before we’ve learned how to get along and love each other for who we truly are. Then when we complain why we ended up losing our appetite. No wonder!”

The couple’s eyes widened, their jaws falling to their feet. They couldn’t believe that they’d missed such an obvious truth.

“We like someone before we've truly began to love them,” continued the wise sage, “Loving someone the way you'd love your friend, sibling or child is the precondition for being in love with them. Because, at the end of the day, how could you claim to be in love with someone if you don’t even know how to just love them?

True love isn’t inherently romantic; romance is the package in which it comes. Yet, we ignore this truth, often at our own peril. We still too often try to be lovers before we are friends. And when we break up, the bond shatters completely, leaving a barren wasteland devoid of any connection, and full of regret, dismay, heartbreak, and even resentment. Recently, I’ve realised why we do this: we fall in love just to fill the emptiness inside us—not realizing that we’re feeding our egos on those we claim to love. There is an asymmetry in the presence or lack of a romantic bond. It seems that friendship without romance is more likely than not to grow into a nourishing blessing, while romance without friendship is more likely than not to devolve into debilitating misery. This is because romance without friendship imprisons our minds within the restrictive bounds of what I call the “be-my-lover-or-get-lost mindset”, causing a budding love to mutate into resentment, animosity and even contempt.

The solution to these compounded problems, isn’t to renounce romance altogether—I am far from suggesting that. The real lesson here is approaching everyone with love, kindness, compassion and mutual respect for our wishes, desires and freedoms. It is that when we treat every human being as a human being, above all else, they are drawn closer to us, and we, to them. And in that connection we find joy; within that joy, love grows, pouring gratitude and appreciation into our hearts. It is now much evident that as we venture into the second quarter of the 21st century, we must reach a point where we treat people as human beings simply because they are human—not because we’re secretly auditioning them for the role of lover.

The issue with how we perceive relationships goes deeper than enhancing our love lives. It’s how we perceive anyone around us, regardless of our relation to them. We’ve been handed a society that measures human worth by what people can offer us—intelligence, productivity, usefulness. Yet we forget a crucial truth: a human without intelligence is still human. But no matter how brilliant you are, intelligence without humanity remains inhuman. Until we grasp this, we will go on confusing love with possession, and friendship with utility. Only when we honour people simply for being human can love, in all its forms, truly endure.