Month: February 2015

The Outlier

February’s theme for Carnival of Aces is “cross-community connections.” I wasn’t planning on writing a contribution for it, but now I’m inspired to write a very informal and largely personal post that happens to qualify.

I’m an asexual who is committed to lifelong celibacy, despite having an active libido and (as far as I know) next to no sex-repulsion. I don’t understand or empathize with asexuals who have sex they don’t want to have, who think that they should be willing to get fucked for romance and love, who buy into sexual society’s message that wanting/having/and liking sex is the only way to be normal and liberated. I’m of the opinion that if you’re at all uncomfortable with sex, even if you aren’t repulsed, you shouldn’t do it. I think there should be far more sexual people going celibate in mixed romantic relationships with aces than there are. I think there should be far more aces who challenge sexual people they date to become celibate, instead of folding to the expectation that it’s the ace who’ll be making the sexual sacrifices without question. I think there oughta be more romantic aces who choose to stay single until they meet someone willing to have a nonsexual romantic relationship than there are and an active, community-wide interrogation of the idea that romantic relationships are the end goal into which aces should be pouring all of their social energy into.

I’m aromantic. I’m romance-repulsed. But I also want long-term, domestic friends I can have committed, intentional relationships with—friends who don’t date other people because they too are perma-single aromantics. I’m an aro who wants a lot of sensual, affectionate, physical intimacy in my close friendships: someone who loves to cuddle, who would like to kiss my passionate friends sometimes, who likes skin to skin contact and hugs and general physical closeness with people I’m emotionally attached to. I’m an aro who is capable of very deep, intense love and emotion, however rarely it happens.

I refuse to date romantic people in order to access love, intimacy, affection, attention, and value. I don’t see anything appealing about romantic relationships at all. Romance and people whose lives revolve around it are irritating at best. At their worst, they make me want to buy an island in the Caribbean and live there alone. It doesn’t matter if they’re sexual or asexual. It doesn’t matter if they’re monogamous or poly. It doesn’t matter if they’re fucking or not. Romance supremacy is romance supremacy, and nothing is more repellant to me. I don’t feel the need to play nice with romantics, whether in ace spaces or the world at large; I’m not going to tip toe around them to keep them comfortable in their assumption that they’re the normal ones and their way of organizing and creating relationships is the default because it’s natural or objectively the best. I’m never going to let them rest easy in their shitty friendship practices or their narrow-minded worldview concerning the nature of human relationships, behavior, and feelings.

I’ve seen romantic aces demonstrate romance supremacy in their words and actions, in education and visibility efforts as well as in online ace spaces. I’ve seen them express beliefs and feelings about romantic relationships as compared to friendship that are no different than what I typically expect of romantic-sexual people. Aromantics may make up one quarter of the asexual community—a pretty damn high number—but we’re still ignored, dismissed, misunderstood, and disrespected. In the end, it doesn’t matter what your sexual orientation is, when it comes to being an asshole in the name of romance. And even putting the assholery aside, there just doesn’t seem to be much about romantic aces that I can relate to. I’m years past figuring out the complexities of sexuality and making peace with my own asexuality, so all the basic level shit that new asexuals often talk about isn’t personally relevant to me. And all the noise romantic aces make about dating, living in dysfunctional or challenging romantic relationships, breaking up with romantic partners over sex, longing for their dream romance isn’t just irrelevant to me, it’s annoying. As annoying as it would be coming from sexual people.

Even politically speaking, I’m at odds with most of the asexual community once we get past the message that asexuality exists. For a long time, I’ve observed in the asexual visibility movement a certain degree of wanting sexual society to validate us, wanting to be accepted as “normal,” wanting to assimilate into their world without changing it much. I realize that once romantic aces get basic education about what asexuality means out of the way, their goals amount to finding romantic relationships that work for them, often with sexual people. They use romance as a way to normalize themselves in the eyes of sexual people, just as some try to win acceptance by reassuring sexual people that aces can still fuck (for “love”). I’ve got absolutely no stake in any of that shit, nor am I on board with the messages themselves.

I’m a relationship anarchist who doesn’t fuck or do romance. If polyamory is a lifestyle on the margins of American society, relationship anarchy is in the margins of polyamory—especially my nonsexual, nonromantic relationship anarchy. I’m happy to report that some polyamorous romantic-sexual people acknowledge the validity of nonsexual love and include nonsexual relationships in their own polycules. Some romantic asexuals are poly, and some aromantics (sexual and ace) are poly. But it seems that most poly people are very sex-centric. Furthermore, my relationship anarchy is a far cry from polyamorous romantic-sexual couples in open marriages who often practice a kind of hierarchical poly and categorize their romantic relationships vs. friendships just as normatively as monogamists do. Romance and sex are still the king and queen of most poly people’s lives, and nonromantic/nonsexual friendship is still an afterthought.

I’m a butch, but not a lesbian. I’m also a genderqueer nonbinary person who’s trying to sort out my complicated feelings about my chest while deconstructing any internalized femmephobia I may have. I’ve recently started to think about the fact that I, like so many others, have been attempting to break out of the gender binary while continuing to observe its rules. I want to be read and respected as masculine, as butch, as nonbinary, but I don’t think I want to have to bind my chest or make all feminine markers off-limits on my body. I don’t want to buy into the farce of masculinity as the neutral default. I don’t want that to be my androgyny, but I don’t know if any other androgyny can exist in the world at large where the gender binary is everywhere. Mostly, I’ve decided that this conundrum is less about my gender identity and more about learning how to let go of the desire for other people’s validation. Good to know that’s still something I have to work on.

Whether or not asexuals and aromantics belong in the LGBTQ community for their asexuality and aromanticism (not their corresponding romantic and sexual orientations) is a question that people still debate and fight over. I’ve long felt like asexuals specifically don’t need to latch on to an LGBTQ community that is sexual at its core, made of people who aren’t much different than heterosexuals in this regard. I acknowledge that there are homo-, bi-, and panromantic asexuals, many of whom will date LGBTQ sexual people and even fuck those people or marry them. But the way I see it, asexuals as a group have very different needs, experiences, and goals than queer sexual people do as a group. I acknowledge that there are aromantic queer sexual people, but how welcome they are in the LGBTQ community that is dominated by romantics remains to be seen on a grand scale.

I was around to witness the firestorm of anti-asexual hate explode out of the LGBTQ community online during its first wave, and I guess that encouraged and solidified my own aversion to unifying the asexual community with the LGBTQ community. I know that there are plenty of LGBTQ sexual people who welcome asexuals and aromantics into their own lives, personal communities, and spaces as fellow queers, and that’s cool of them. But I’m still not sold on the idea of lumping aces and aros in with the LGBTQ romantic-sexual people of the world. When sex and marriage are increasingly centralized in the mainstream LGBTQ/Gay Inc. political movement and in the lives of the more privileged (read: white, cis, middle and upper class) romantic-sexual queers, it’s hard for me to see what the average asexual or aromantic person has to gain from inclusion in that movement and the queer community itself.

Furthermore, I’m never going to allow anyone to forget that LGBTQ sexual people, the same as their heterosexual counterparts, are the abusers and rapists of asexuals who try to connect with them romantically. They are also fueling the engine of amatonormativity in our culture, drinking the Kool-Aid of romance fantasy no less than straight people and abandoning the truly queer family configurations and lifestyles that used to be all LGBTQ people had as a source of love and support, before they had the option to get on the straight path to the nuclear family. They can herald the empowerment and liberation to be found in fucking freely as queer people (disguising compulsory sexuality as sex positivity), then in the same breath turn around and slut shame aromantic queers who don’t want to date them, marry them, or fall in line with the homonormative image of the monogamous, romantic same-sex married couple that puts straight people at ease.

On a personal level, I’m in a strange position because the world and even my own queer friends usually look at me and see someone queer. My gender makes me queer, my relationship style makes me queer, my sexuality makes me queer, my politics and beliefs make me queer. It’s not even so much a conclusion they reach after running an in-depth analysis. It’s more instinctual: even if strangers can never guess that I’m an aromantic asexual genderqueer person, they can often tell I’m not heterosexual. There’s something very not-straight about me, even just visually. I think that they usually just mistake me for gay; after all, most people only know about straight and gay as categories, forgetting about other queer sexualities, being ignorant of asexuality and aromanticism and gender identities other than cismale and cisfemale.

But I don’t feel queer. I don’t see myself as queer. Not really. Queerness seems to be all about sex and romance, about desires and dramas that I will never experience, about lifestyles that don’t include people like me and relationships like the ones I want. In my eyes, the world is divided into people who center romance and people who center friendship, and most queer sexual people, being romantic, fall into the first group no less and no differently than the vast majority of heterosexuals. Friendship doesn’t factor into heterosexuality or homosexuality, into being straight or being queer. Even friendship that goes far beyond what it’s supposed to be relative to romance. Even friendship that is physically intimate and emotionally passionate.

In terms of my queer qualifications, it doesn’t matter who I love, who I live with, who I make commitments with. It doesn’t matter if I kiss, cuddle, and caress people I love, and it doesn’t matter who those people are or what their genders are. It doesn’t matter that I reject monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family. It doesn’t even really matter that I’m a nonbinary butch that can confuse strangers regarding what my gender is. If I’m not fucking and falling in love, if I’m not claiming the labels “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual,” if I’m not taking steps to change my body into one less gendered or at the very least doing everything I can to hide my assigned sex, I’m not queer enough to be queer.

And beyond the fact that I don’t need or want partnered sex to be part of my life, I also don’t have much in common with other asexuals, 75% of whom are romantic. In fact, I feel closer to aromantic sexual people than I do to romantic aces, even the aro sexual people who need to be sexually active pretty much all the time. It’s funny: I don’t relate to most asexuals who spend most of their time in ace spaces moaning about romance and how hard it is to date when you don’t like sex, and I also can’t personally relate to aromantic sexual people when it comes to the particular difficulties of having a sex life while avoiding romantic relationships. Fortunately, aromantics seem to share a lot of common feelings about friendship as the most important and appealing thing in life, regardless of sexual orientation, but the fact is, in aro spaces, there is a certain division between aces and sexual people. In many ways, it’s easier to be aro and ace, than it is to be aromantic and sexual. There are struggles that sexual aros live with that I will never have to deal with. And there are some sexual aros who would still like to center sexual relationships, even if nonromantic, in their lives rather than nonsexual friendship. It’s easier for me to feel connection with aros generally, including aro sexual people, than it is with romantic aces….. But ultimately, it’s only other aromantic asexuals who I fully belong with. And even there, it’s the aro aces who aren’t dating, who embrace their aromanticism, who want queerplatonic friendships and won’t bother trying to masquerade as romantic.

I’m the asexual in a world full of sexual people, and I will not fuck you. I’m the aromantic in a world full of romantics, and I will die before submitting to normative romantic relationships as a way to access love and priority. I’m the genderqueer person who doesn’t fall into the male-female binary, the butch with big tits who occasionally wears nail polish or leggings or eyeliner. I’m the relationship anarchist who centers friendship in my life.

I’m an outlier, any way you slice it. And to some degree, it’s the intersection of all these different identities—asexual, aromantic, genderqueer, butch, relationship anarchist—that places me in the margins of each individual community. It’s easy for me to see the fractures in these communities, easy for me to recognize that there isn’t any cohesion or unity across the board, that there’s more internal rifts than anyone wants to own up to. I do feel a sense of kinship with people who are LGBTQ and people who are asexual and people who are polyamorous. But ultimately, the community I want for myself is a community of permanently single aromantics whose lifestyles and value system reflect the same prioritization of friendship that I feel. Their sexual orientations and gender identities don’t matter much to me, in comparison to their singleness and their aromanticism.

I feel like an ally, a supporter, of all these different groups of people that I share certain traits with. But I don’t feel a sense of complete belonging with any group, except the aromantic asexuals who are like me.

The Romance Monopoly

On the long list of things that romantic people do and say that piss me off, the following has long been near the top of the list:

“I married my best friend!”

“I’m in love with my best friend!”

And any other expression of the idea that one’s romantic partner is also one’s “best friend.”

I acknowledge that friendship can be part of someone’s romantic relationship, and depending on how you look at it, a romantic relationship can actually be better off if friendship is a part of it. I also think that successful, long-term romantic relationships actually do evolve into a kind of friendship over time, shedding much of its romantic energy, and that this is often an inevitable consequence of being close to someone for many years. It’s not that I think there’s a problem with seeing your romantic partner as a friend.

What’s so annoying and sometimes even offensive to me about people who claim that their romantic partner is also their best friend comes down to the common social model of Romance Monopoly.

Merriam-Webster defines “monopoly” as: exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action; exclusive possession or control; a commodity controlled by one party. Usually, this is a term or phenomenon used in economics, and in the American economy, monopolies are frowned upon (and even illegal) because if you can only purchase a necessary good or service from one provider, that provider can overcharge their customers and still successfully turn a profit. Introducing a competitor in a particular market means that every company in that market has to keep their prices within range of each other; obviously, if you charge twice or three times as much as your competition when providing the same product or service at comparable quality, you’ll lose buyers. If you have no competition, you can charge whatever you want, you can under-produce which makes your product a limited resource that not everybody can access, you can get away with producing a product or service of lower quality, etc—because no matter what you do or don’t do, people are going to buy from you. There is no incentive to improve your product or service, to meet consumer demand, or set reasonable prices. Prohibiting monopolies is a way of preventing unethical or unreasonable behavior on the part of businesses.

So what do I mean by “The Romance Monopoly”?

The concept behind the romance monopoly is essentially:

By restricting access to commonly desired experiences, both behavioral and emotional, to romantic relationships, romantic people create a social system in which a person’s well-being and happiness is often dependent upon their participating in romantic relationships. The consequences of this are twofold: people often have a bullshit threshold in romantic relationships that is astronomically high, making it easier for abuse, unhappiness, and general dysfunction to continue unchecked or much longer than it would otherwise, because people are willing to put up with the negativity for the sake of maintaining access to those emotional and practical resources they can’t get anywhere else; second, the restriction of desirable resources to romantic relationships makes it possible and logical for romantic relationships to maintain its position at the top of the relationship hierarchy (both on an individual basis and on a broad, cultural level) regardless of how well that organization of relationships actually serves people involved. When romance monopolizes positive social experiences, friendship automatically has little value in comparison.

The Romantic-Sexual Relationship Hierarchy is intimately connected to amatonormativity. Let me remind you that amatonormativity is “the assumption that a central, exclusive, amorous (romantic) relationship is normal for humans, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in the sense that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types,” and that this is not just a personal attitude but a cultural paradigm, like heteronormativity. In fact, romance supremacy (the belief that romance is intrinsically superior to and more valuable than friendship and should be treated as such) and amatonormativity depend on each other for survival. Amatonormativity makes romance supremacy possible and vice versa, and if you destroy one, you inevitably destroy the other.

So here’s what society brainwashes you into believing: you should want and have romantic relationships, because that’s the only way to be “normal,” and you should see romantic relationships as superior to all other types, because romantic relationships are the one and only source of everything positive you need and desire to experience interactively with other human beings. All the affection, connection, intimacy, quality time, touch, trust, support, attention, sex, and commitment you might want or need to feel fulfilled, secure, valuable, etc can only come through romantic relationships, so if you reject romantic relationships, you reject all of those resources that you want and need for happiness and well-being. Because romantic relationships are the exclusive wellspring of these desired and necessary experiences, you should consider them significantly better and more important than any other kind of relationship, and if you don’t act like it, you’re a bad person who doesn’t deserve romantic relationships.

Then, we have pop culture’s messages about romance. The Romantic Happily Ever After Fantasy. Your One True Romantic Love is the only person you should want, the only person you should need, the only person who can or should satisfy your every physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual need and desire. And if the romantic partner you’ve got doesn’t meet those standards, you’re not with the right one. It’s wrong to want or need more than one romantic partner, and it’s wrong to want or need anything from anyone who is not your romantic partner. That’s part of the fantasy, after all, part of what makes the True Love story so romantic: the idea that once, you were an empty, incomplete, sad excuse for a person who was tortured with unfulfilled desire, and along came your One True Romantic Love, who had the sole power to complete, fulfill, and satisfy you, and with them, you experience a joy that is not otherwise possible.

That shit falls totally flat if you have more than one romantic partner that pleases you—or God forbid, you can find joy and fulfillment without romance. As it goes in economics, exclusivity and scarcity increase the value of a particular product or service. One way we determine specialness, whether we’re talking about a person, a diamond, or a type of relationship, is by how rare the thing in question is. The more common a thing, the lower its worth. Your average romantic monogamist can have 20 so-called “friends” but only one romantic partner, and that contrast increases the perceived worth and specialness of their romantic relationship. Notice how monogamous skeptics of polyamory often challenge poly people by asking, “Doesn’t adding a second (or third, etc) romantic partner to your life make your original romantic relationship less special?” The same sentiment is often taught regarding sex: “You should only have sex with someone you’re in love with, so that the sex is special. It’s not special if you’re screwing around with multiple people.” The rhetoric of romantic relationships, monogamy, romance supremacy, ideal sexual conduct, etc is more reflective of economics than anybody cares to acknowledge, but it should come as no surprise to you, considering how closely intertwined sex and romance are with capitalism in American culture. Sex sells, after all, and so does romance.

Romantic people who say their romantic partners are their best friends piss me off for a variety of reasons. First of all, this is the ultimate expression of romance monopoly: not only do these people reserve the vast majority of positive social experience to their romantic relationship but they take it so far as to bleed romance into friendship territory, creating a situation in which their romantic relationship quiet literally takes away most of the potential that their nonromantic friendships might have to provide desired experiences and resources. They don’t need or want anything significant from anyone on planet Earth besides their romantic partner, because they place both romantic and best friend expectations onto the same person, and by comparison, everybody else they know or might know is worthless. As a friend, you have nothing to offer someone who subscribes to romance monopoly, because everything they perceive as valuable comes only through their romantic relationship. You could offer all the love, care, affection, attention, trust, and intimacy in the world, and it will be met with indifference and ingratitude.

Second of all, naming your romantic partner as your best friend is a cop-out. You don’t have to actually do any of the emotional or practical work to create and maintain a real, nonromantic best friendship with someone because you have your romantic partner working double duty. You isolate yourself on a sort of emotional island with your romantic partner, so that nobody else can engage with you in meaningful ways or experience real intimacy and connection with you, maybe even out of the insecurity that if you or your romantic partner form friendships with other people equal or almost equal to your romantic relationship, that will somehow detract from the “specialness” of your romantic relationship. It’s a kind of emotional and social greed, mutually shared between romantic partners. (And there’s a lot of overlap between this and monogamy.)

Third, the idea that your romantic partner and your closest friend can or even should be the same person is a major reinforcement of romance monopoly on a functional level. Where there could be and once was a division of social roles in a person’s life, a distribution of emotional and behavioral functions amongst a network of lovers, friends, and family members, now there’s just this concentration of everything into one person, one relationship. That funneling of all positive experiences, responsibilities, and functions into the romantic relationship basically renders friendships and familial relationships superfluous. Unnecessary. Disposable. Easily neglected. And the flipside of this is, if your romantic relationship fails, you’re fucked. You lose not only the innate benefits of romance, but all those other emotional and practical resources that could’ve been reaped from friendship and family.

What does it say about you, if the only “best friend” you ever have is your romantic partner? You can only manage to create a best friendship with someone if you’re fucking the person and causing them to experience romantic feelings? Do you even know how to be close friends with another human being, in a nonsexual and nonromantic context? Do you have anything to offer someone in friendship, when you take the sexual and romantic elements away? Are you actually capable of loving another person, for nonsexual and nonromantic reasons? Are you yourself lovable nonromantically and nonsexually?

Because here’s the thing: romantic and sexual attraction often skew a person’s perception of someone else. It distorts your judgment of someone else’s character, their behavior, their treatment of you, their overall attractiveness and desirability. Sex and romance fool people into thinking that their lovers are better than they are, convince them into accepting treatment and behavior they would never otherwise accept. Friendship does no such thing. Nonromantic, nonsexual friendship is built on reality, not fantasy. We see our nonromantic, nonsexual friends for who they are, not who we want them to be. Sex and romance have a neurochemical power to build a kind of instant and/or pseudo-intimacy and closeness between people, people who don’t actually know each other; that intimacy and closeness are not earned, the way they are in nonromantic, nonsexual friendship. So, if you can only build intimacy and connection with someone if sex and romance do all the heavy-lifting for you, if sex and romance are necessary causes of someone else loving you and feeling attached to you, you’re probably not someone worth being close friends with, frankly.

One of two things must be true of people whose romantic partners are also their best friends:

1. They can’t actually form a best or particularly close friendship with someone in a nonromantic, nonsexual context—or they simply don’t value friendship, of the nonromantic and nonsexual variety. (Maybe both.) They only value romantic relationships, and calling their romantic partner their “best friend” is really just a nice way of saying that their romantic partner is the only person they have a close, meaningful relationship with.

2. They had a nonromantic, nonsexual best friend prior to getting married or pairing up with their romantic partner, and upon entering their romantic relationship, they basically demoted their ex-best friend to a lower friendship status, so they could rank their romantic partner at the top of both their overall social pyramid and at the top of their friendship group.

In either case, these people are not ones you want to get mixed up with if you’re looking for serious, meaningful friendship and if you actually highly value and even prioritize friendship in your own life. They’re a major waste of friendly love. They’re acquaintance material, and that’s all.

People who are guilty of the second scenario are especially vile, in my book. If you subordinate a best friend—who your probably knew much longer than you did your romantic partner, who invested their time and energy and emotions into your friendship, who is more likely to outlast your romantic relationship than vice versa—to a romantic partner, even to the point of throwing the best friend out of their role amongst your friend group just to place your romantic partner in BOTH slots, for no reason other than your romantic partner is your romantic partner, you are a traitor of the highest order. You’re trash. You don’t deserve good friendship. Fuck off into your romantic relationship and leave friendship to people who actually value it as important.

If romance is only “special,” meaningful, and satisfying when it monopolizes positive social experience and degrades friendship, then at its core, romance ain’t shit. And in all likelihood, if we could ever live in a world where all the positive emotional and social experiences we desire were available in friendship and family relationships, romance would no longer be the ultimate fairy tale to obsess over, but just one option on the buffet table. We wouldn’t see romance as the ultimate prize; instead, the prize would be love, in whatever form it takes. People wouldn’t have to feel so dependent on romantic relationships for happiness or love or companionship or sex or family or anything other than romantic feelings and romantic expression. Friendship would matter just as much, if not more, as romance to romantic people—something I can hardly imagine.

TV Show Recommendations for Friendship Fans

I’m adding a page with a list of TV shows and movies I recommend, in which friendship or sibling relationships are central to the story and particularly satisfying by my standards. These are my favorite shows and films. I’m adding descriptions of the TV shows here in this post, but on the page, I’ll only list the titles. I know it’s hard to find good TV or movies that are heavy on nonromantic/nonsexual friendship and light on romance/sex, so I figure I’d offer up the ones I know to be good for anyone in need.

**Disclaimer: My taste in media falls primarily into the crime drama camp, as you’ll see. As such, none of these shows are particularly light-hearted, and they all involve some degree of violence, obviously crime, and dark themes. There is a fucking shitload of angst in these stories, but also plenty of love and gold nuggets of friendship too, which make it worth watching to me.

Every show on this list, except Elementary and True Detective, can be streamed on Netflix. TD can be streamed on Amazon or HBO Go. Elementary can be rented via Netflix’s mail-in DVD service, if you have that subscription.

Enjoy!

 

Awesome Friendship-Centric TV Shows:

 

Supernatural – Sam and Dean are brothers and nonromantic/nonsexual soul mates. Their relationship is primary in the show and in their lives. They live on the road together. Their love is epic on a cosmic level, and I’m being literal, not exaggerating. Furthermore, all the other strong relationships in the show are nonromantic and nonsexual: Sam and Dean’s relationship with friend and surrogate father Bobby Singer, Dean’s friendship with Castiel, Sam and Dean’s friendship with Charlie (a girl!). In this universe, it’s fraternal love that is the most significant. Sam and Dean have sex with women, but sex is relatively unimportant in their emotional and social lives.

(For the record: I read Sam and Dean’s relationship as a queerplatonic primary partnership, Dean as an aromantic-spectrum character, and Dean and Castiel’s friendship as queerplatonic. And it is really easy to do so.)

Warning: torture, body horror, death, rip your heart out angst.

Sons of Anarchy – This is a show about a biker gang involved in criminal activity. It’s also a show about family and friendship. The MC members are all pretty sexual guys, there are traditional marriages and romantic/sexual relationships, but the friendships are equally as important, emotional, affectionate, and involved. These men work together and spend much of their free time together, they treat each other like family and protect the community they belong to made up of MC wives, children, romantic partners, etc. Protagonist Jax Teller has an ongoing love affair with his high school sweetheart Tara Knowles, but his relationship with his childhood best friend Opie Winston is just as important, maybe more important, to him as his romantic relationship with Tara. And all the other friendships in the club have ample moments of emotion and affection too. (These guys say “I love you” to each other on a regular basis. No lie.)

Warning: graphic violence, tragedy, sex crimes, death, rip your heart out angst, etc.

House MD – Dr. Gregory House is the protagonist of this medical drama, and the most important relationship in his life is the one he has with his long-time best friend Dr. James Wilson. These two work together, lunch together, live together more than once throughout the show’s eight seasons, and ultimately, the show’s conclusion rests in their friendship. Both men go through failed romantic/sexual relationships and their own friendship sees hard times. But they love each other enough that they always find their way back to each other and their friendship outlasts their romantic relationships.

Warning: drug abuse, gross body stuff of the medical variety.

BBC Sherlock – The BBC’s most recent adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories is set in the 21st century but stays true to the friendship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson immortalized in the 19th century stories. These two men live together during the first two seasons, spend most of their free time together, and John rides on Sherlock’s coattails as they solve crimes together in London. Their relationship is the most important one in their lives through the first two seasons, during which John Watson’s romantic/sexual entanglements with women are fleeting. (Sherlock Holmes, as always, is unofficially asexual, aromantic, and celibate. Canonically, BBC!Sherlock is a thirty-something year old virgin who shows absolutely no interest in sex or dating.) Even in the third season, when Watson gets married, it’s made clear that his friendship with Sherlock is equal in his eyes to his romantic relationship, and Mary Morstan-Watson is actually a fan of the men’s friendship, encouraging their closeness and winning Sherlock’s affection. Sherlock is also friends with Detective Inspector Lestrade, his landlady Mrs. Hudson, and Molly Hooper. At least for the first two seasons, friendship is central to this show, and even in season 3, Sherlock remains a main character who is voluntarily single and depends on his friends for emotional connection.

Warning: violence, death, tragedy, drug abuse.

Elementary – Another adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories set in the 21st century, this show is unique in that it cast Watson as female (Joan Watson played by Lucy Liu is fabulous) and placed the story in New York City, rather than London. Holmes and Watson have a beautiful cross-sex friendship that is damn near revolutionary for TV: they live together by choice during the first two seasons as Watson transitions from being Holmes’ drug recovery sponsor to his apprentice, assisting the NYPD in solving crimes. So far, there’s a refreshing absence of romantic relationships, though there’s been some sex and casual dates and a complex plot twist concerning Holmes’ one and only romantic love of the past. When the show doesn’t focus on the Holmes and Watson friendship, it gives attention to other friendships in their lives: Holmes’ relationship with Detective Marcus Bell, his relationship with Captain Gregson, and in Season 3, a very touching friendship with his second apprentice Kitty Winter. This show has done so many things well, but its crowning glory is the cross-sex friendship between Watson and Holmes that, among other things, shapes Holmes into a better person.

Warning: violence, death, history of drug abuse.

BBC Luther – This crime thriller drama set in contemporary London follows DCI John Luther, a complicated man who is a brilliant detective but engages in some questionable conduct on the job. Only three short seasons, the show presents Luther as a man who, while clearly romantic and sexual, relies upon the friendships he builds with men and women alike. His friendship with DS Justin Ripley begins in the first episode and continues to the series end; these two men clearly care deeply for each other. Ripley is the one person on the police force who is loyal to Luther unconditionally. Luther, in turn, openly acknowledges his love for Ripley. Another stand-out relationship on the show is also established in the first episode: a titillating and complex friendship between Luther and psychopathic killer Alice Morgan, who comes to admire Luther and helps him in moments of need. Other friendships take up less screen time but nevertheless add to the presentation of Luther as someone who appreciates friendship as much, if not more, than romantic-sexual relationships.

The show is spectacularly good, and if you like crime shows or thrillers, you should watch it for that reason alone.

Warning: graphic violence, torture, murder, death, tragedy, rip your heart out angst, sex crimes, etc.

True Detective (Season 1) – Only eight episodes, this HBO drama is part police procedural, part noir, and the relationship between partners Detective Marty Hart and Detective Rust Cohle is front and center. The story spans seventeen years, as the two men talk about the first big case they worked in 1995 during interviews in 2012. After a ten year estrangement, Marty and Rust reconcile to finish solving that big case they mistakenly thought they’d closed in ’95. Throughout the story, they butt heads professionally and personally, and they can be harsh toward each other. But their friendship and the affection and concern they have for each other are undeniable. These two deeply flawed and damaged men share a bond that ultimately sees them through one of the toughest and most horrific experiences of their lives, and in the end, it’s the one thing they have to hold onto. The show is incredibly well-done in so many ways, and if you like crime dramas or noir, you’re likely enjoy the hell out of TD S1.

Warning: graphic violence, sex crimes involving women and children, murder, drug abuse, everything that could go wrong basically does, alcoholism, terrible people doing terrible things to each other.

Longmire – This police procedural crime drama is based off of the Walt Longmire mystery novels written by Craig Johnson (which I highly recommend). After three seasons on A&E, the show was cancelled by the network, only to be picked up by Netflix, where season 4 will air later in 2015. Walt Longmire is the aging sheriff of Absaroka County in rural Wyoming, and along with his very small staff of deputies, he is responsible for solving the crimes in his sparsely populated county. Walt is recently widowed when the show starts, and the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death is an ongoing subplot in the show. One of his most important relationships is with his oldest and best friend Henry Standing Bear, who he’s known since they were in grade school. Henry and Walt share a deep bond, and throughout the show, it is very clear that they love and care about each other quite a lot. Their friendship, like most aspects of the show, is understated and subtle—but there’s a great deal of substance there.

Warning: violence, death, murder.

Sleepy Hollow – This supernatural/historical drama puts a cross-sex friendship between Abby Mills, of Sleepy Hollow PD, and Ichabod Crane, a military man who died during the Revolutionary War and resurrected in the 21st century, front and center. Their friendship is funny, sweet, affectionate, and by the end of this first season, important enough that Crane affirms to Abby his loyalty and their bond as his long lost wife looks on. The other important relationships in Abby’s life are also nonromantic/nonsexual: the relationship with her sister Jenny, her friendship with the mentor and eventual supervisor who saw her grew up, and her professional relationship with her commanding officer Captain Irving. Abby Mills has stayed single thus far, and even when Crane’s wife becomes more present in Season 2, his friendship with Abby remains equally and sometimes more important than his marriage.

Warning: violence, death, supernatural horror, suicide, murder.

The Black Donnellys – This short-lived TV drama that only survived for one season is about four brothers living in 21st century NYC, who end up pulled into a conflict between the Irish Mob and Italian Mafia. Narrated by the brothers’ long-time, close friend who “always wanted brothers like that,” there’s a lot of nonromantic love in these thirteen episodes, love that is important enough for Tommy Donnelly to choose brotherhood over romance when he’s forced to make that choice.

Warning: violence, murder, drug abuse.