Why Are Friendship and Community Part of Relationship Education?

Romantic stories often describe an ideal partner as “the only person who understands me.” The hope is moving, but it can assign one relationship the work of friends, family, colleagues, faith communities, and an entire support network. Two people may love deeply and still be unable to meet every emotional, practical, and civic need for one another.

The U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on social connection brought together a broad body of evidence and treated individual relationships, community participation, and the wider social environment as parts of connection. The point is not that everyone should become outgoing. Human flourishing ordinarily needs several kinds of dependable relationship.

Friendship is a practice ground for love

Friendship teaches initiative, kept promises, attention across disagreement, apology, forgiveness, and acceptance that relationships change in closeness. Friends also carry shared interests, history, and perspectives a partner cannot provide. Maintaining friendship is not disloyal to romance; it keeps two people from loading every need onto one bond.

Community moves intimacy beyond private feeling. Serving a neighbor, participating in school life, volunteering, or belonging to a faith community trains responsibility without romantic reward. It also builds practical help. When a child needs transport, illness enters a household, or an older relative needs care, a real community turns concern into action.

Connection still requires boundaries and choice

Not every group is healthy. Be cautious when a community demands estrangement from family, surrender of privacy, unquestioned obedience to a leader, or loyalty enforced by threat and humiliation. A good community permits questions, departure, disagreement, and appropriate private space. It asks for responsibility without swallowing conscience.

Partners can discuss how much shared social life and independent friendship each needs. “Why am I not enough?” should not become proof of love. Nor should friends be used to avoid duties that belong inside the partnership. A mature arrangement protects time for the couple and legitimate relationships and public life for each person.

Practice: schedule one outward act of love

Name one friendship to maintain, one community to join, and one service task the household might share. During the next seven days, complete one: make a call, attend a recurring meeting, bring food to a neighbor, or begin regular service. Afterwards ask whether the connection strengthens your capacity to return to close relationships or merely helps you avoid them.

A university that teaches love should not teach only how to find a partner. It should teach people to be friends, neighbors, and family members—and to become dependable participants in a shared world.

References

• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (2023).