What If Everything You’ve Been Taught About Love Is Too Small?

We’re taught to measure love in milestones: first kisses, anniversaries, and wedding bands. Love, we’re told, is linear. Two people (preferably one man, one woman), for as long as forever will allow. Everything else, friendships, casual flings, group chats, post-coital cuddles with people we’re not dating, is just noise. Background. Side characters in the main story.

But if you’ve spent time in queer community, the real, messy, beautiful queer community, you start to see how incomplete that story is.

Queer love explodes the idea that love has to look a certain way. Queer love, by necessity, by rebellion, by sheer creative force, makes space for connection that doesn’t fit into the neat boxes. And perhaps its most radical offering is the idea that intimacy doesn’t need to be sexual or romantic to be real, deep, or life-changing.

Why Queer People Had to Reimagine Family

For many queer people, family has never been a given. When your identity is questioned, erased, or rejected by your family of origin, you learn to build elsewhere. Not out of convenience, but survival. It’s not just a metaphor. People are kicked out, disowned, or silenced every day for loving the “wrong” person, having the “wrong” gender, or simply being too much for a world that sadly prefers its people quiet, straight, and simple.

In that space of abandonment, queer people created something powerful: chosen family.

The chosen family isn’t just a friend group. It’s your emergency contact. Your financial safety net. The one who brings you meds and pads when you’re sick. The people you co-parent pets with. The ones you’ll grow old beside, even if you never exchange vows.

This isn’t new. It’s a lineage. From ballroom houses to lesbian land collectives, queer folks have been doing this forever. In a world that tells you what you are isn’t enough — queer people love each other more.

Platonic Intimacy as Protest

We need to talk about how radical platonic intimacy is. Holding hands with a friend. Sleeping in the same bed with someone you’re not sleeping with. Saying I love you and meaning it, without the safety net of irony or emojis. These things shouldn’t feel subversive. But they are, especially in cultures where touch is policed, vulnerability is gendered, and “just friends” means distant, disposable.

But in queer circles, that intimacy is foundational. And it’s not a consolation prize for those not lucky enough to find “the one”, it is the one. Or one of many. Because love doesn’t have to be monogamous. Or romantic. Or owned. 

As Alok Vaid-Menon writes:

“I want a world where we can cuddle our friends, hold hands with strangers, and leave room in our lives for softness that isn’t sexual or romantic.”

That vision, one where softness isn’t suspect, where closeness isn’t proof of a “secret relationship,” where love is abundant and unapologetic, is queer liberation in action.

The Emotional Infrastructure Queer People Built

It’s not just about the aesthetics of affection. There’s an emotional depth to queer friendship and chosen family that’s architectural. Built with intention. Shaped by a shared understanding that the world outside may not get us — but in here, we do.

Queer platonic love holds space for breakups that aren’t bitter, for group dynamics that shift and flex, for care work that’s mutual, not transactional.

It’s the friend who knows your triggers. Who remembers your pronouns when your own mother won’t. Who brings lube and pads and chardonnay in the same tote bag. Who reads your silence like a book and still asks what you need.

It’s emotional labor, yes, but it’s also emotional freedom. Because you get to show up exactly as you are.

What Cishet Culture Could Learn from This

To cis, straight readers, this isn’t a story to admire from the sidelines. It’s an invitation. You don’t need to be queer to choose your people intentionally. To prioritize friendship. To build your own emotional architecture beyond coupledom.

Imagine if we treated our friends like soulmates. If we raised our children in clusters. If we planned our futures around connection instead of convention. If we de-centred romance just enough to let the other loves in our lives matter more. And of course, this is the case for many of us. But the more this idea spreads, the better.

Queer people had to build this because we had to survive. But you can build it because you want to live better.

A Pride Worth Remembering

As Pride rolls around, we’ll see a thousand declarations of love. And that’s beautiful. But let’s remember that not all love has to be romantic, or sexual, or sanctioned by the state. Some of the deepest, queerest, most soul-affirming love shows up in friendship. In chosen family. In the kind of intimacy that has no script, no status update, no rulebook.

So let’s celebrate it. Let’s give it flowers. Let’s let it rewire us, a little.

Love is big. Queer love is bigger.

Tell us about your chosen family. Share your story and tag us @_please_x_