You Need to Date Your Friends

Image Courtesy: Mirror Palais

Modern dating is hitting its breaking point. Eighty-six percent of young people are interested in getting married someday, but around two-thirds of them can't manage more than a couple of dates per year. 

After a flurry of headlines in the past year like Vogue's “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” and Cosmopolitan’s “TikTok No Longer Seems to Care If Your Boyfriend Sucks,” the outlook is overwhelmingly bleak. 

We have total romantic pessimism closing in on us from all sides. Is it time to surrender? To wave our white flags and elope to a compound with our closest friends?

Well, yes and no.

First, we have to unpack where things are going wrong. According to a 2026 study, The State of Our Unions, a large majority of young adults don’t trust their own judgment and feel uncomfortable opening up to potential partners. And how could they? 

Gen Z is coming of age in a hyper-comparison culture with an ever-evolving media feed of worst-case scenarios and rotating villains of the week, subject to public shaming. 

Any action or decision that’s hasty, misread, or an honest mistake runs the risk of being screenshotted or filmed for the world to see. If the fear of exposure isn’t enough to make today’s young adults entirely risk-averse, being shown the worst-case scenario for every potential choice they could make will likely do the trick. 

TikTok has granted virality to dozens of horrible affairs and cases of mistreatment between partners. The resulting anxiety is only natural. The world won't change overnight, as much as we may want it to, but that doesn't mean we have to roll over and surrender to the tides of modern dating either. 

We need to date our friends.

Now, I'm not telling you to lower your standards or give up what you really want in a partner. I don’t want you to tie yourself to someone uncomplicated but unattractive to you. 

I'm asking you to try to approach a relationship like a friendship first.

Romantic relationships require a strong foundation, as within one, you have to navigate feelings and boundaries extremely closely. You need a certain understanding of one another’s sensitivities and communication styles, as one wrong move can have disastrous consequences when wrestling with things as delicate as jealousy and intimacy. Relationships require an incredible amount of vulnerability from the second they start. It's an unfair expectation for both you and your partner to have that understanding after only a few Hinge dates.

Friendships, by contrast, have a wide range of intensities and responsibilities. Early on, you don't owe each other much.

It’s easier that way. You don't have to navigate terrain you haven't yet mapped out, because there's no responsibility to change the way you behave around them or the other people in your life to accommodate them. Consistently showing up is enough. Practically, it's how you learn more about who they are, and emotionally, it's how you prove to them that you care enough to put in the work. 

Over time, your obligations grow, but so does the emotional intimacy. You may be expected to approach conflict a certain way or comfort them through a breakup, but in return, they might pick up your favorite candy on a bad day or throw you the surprise party you'd once confessed you've always dreamed of.

Relationships push you to the greatest difficulty right off the bat. Building a friendship first, or even building a relationship in the image of a friendship, gives you the framework you need to navigate the scary stuff safely.

And relationships will always be scary.

There's a lot of controversy around “ruining the friendship," and that definitely becomes a bigger risk if you become friends first or have the perfect misfortune of falling in love with a friend. There's a lot of fear around what happens when things change, but things will change anyway. You'll graduate, move, get a new job, make friends, lose friends, and wind up in a completely different place than you are today. 

Nothing is certain, but if you built that friendship strong, it can often survive that worst-case scenario. And if it works out? You already have the perfect framework.

Ruin the friendship. Take risks, fall in love, and break your heart!

Strike Out,

Orlando

Written by Emily Neillands

Edited by Brenda Nunes and Jaz DeGuzman

Emily Neillands is a staff writer for Strike Magazine, Orlando. Starting in elementary school composition notebooks, Emily has always loved to write. When she's not ruining her posture over her laptop, she can be found in concert venues, art halls, and monopolizing her roommate's dog. She hopes her passion shines through in everything that she writes.