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Why platonic love is the most underrated relationship of our lives
22nd May, 2026 08:17 PM
There is a particular kind of love that does not get a wedding, a proposal, or a national holiday.
It does not come with expectations about finances, children, or a shared last name.
But it is the love that sits with you at 11pm when something feels wrong, the one that quietly tracks how you have been without being asked.
Platonic friendship – the deep, reciprocal bond between people who choose each other freely, tends to be treated in Kenyan culture as a pleasant bonus to life, somewhere below family obligations and romantic partnership on the list of relationships worth investing in.
What science says about your closest friends
A 2023 review of 38 studies, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found that “adult friendship was found to predict or at least be positively correlated with wellbeing and its components,” with friendship quality and regular socialisation identified as among the strongest predictors of life satisfaction, positive emotion, and psychological health.
The researchers also found that close friendships actively protect against depression and anxiety – not just in youth, but across the full span of adulthood.
Studies consistently place deep platonic bonds alongside romantic partnership in terms of their impact on how well, and how long, we live.
A friend who knows you, supports your autonomy, and shows up consistently are a health resource.
Why Kenyans tend to underinvest in friendship
Kenyan social life is structured around family first, then romantic partnership, with friendship occupying a kind of informal, unserious tier.
We celebrate harambees for weddings; nobody throws one for a twenty-year friendship. We check on newly married couples; we rarely ask how someone’s closest friend is doing.
Part of what makes this so costly is that platonic friendship offers something neither family nor romance reliably provides: a relationship built entirely on choice and reciprocity, with no structural obligation holding it together.
That is not a weakness – it is the whole point. When someone stays close to you across years, across distance, across your worst moods and most difficult seasons, it is because they want to.
That voluntary, unconditional quality is what research shows makes certain friendships as psychologically sustaining as the relationships we have spent centuries writing songs about.
The friend who has known you through three jobs, two heartbreaks, and one genuinely terrible haircut is not a supporting character. In many of the ways that count most, they are the main event.
