Gen-Z's Spousification of Friends | When You Expect To Never Find Someone

Hey Everybody,
Marcus here.
Zoomer girls live under the shadow of the girl boss era. It is assumed by them that one can lead a fulfilling life without a romantic partner. The guys, on the other hand, live in the incel shadow assuming they will most likely never find a compatible romantic partner.
In both cases, it is asserted that a romantic relationship cannot be assumed to be part of one’s life story. This means one cannot plan a future that necessitates a relationship. This would have been absolutely unheard of to past generations. Even millennials did not have an outlook that bleak as far as pairing off was concerned. No, this attitude is new to Gen-Z. The truth of this attitude seems to show up most prominently in the level of importance Gen-Z attributes to friendships. Friendships that they gravely struggle to form due to the increased necessity for commonality between friends.
Now, I posit that there is a causal link between the collapse of friendship and the collapse of romantic relationships. Namely, the needs previously met in a romantic relationship are being offloaded to friends. In other words, friends are now expected to act as surrogate romantic partners. Consequent to this, the standards for friendship formation have inflated due to this demand.
But let me put all of this into a diagram for clarity.
Ok. In the past, we can generally assume two social realms. The transitory realm of work and friendship, and the permanent realm of family. Work and friendship by necessity were transitory because the needs of the family always took priority over one’s job, co-workers, and one’s friends. If a conflict ever emerged between a friend, employer, or non-family associate, the conflict would be resolved in favor of the family; the primary relationship.
If the family needed more money, jobs, and careers would be changed. If the family needed to move for any reason, friendships would be left to die on the vine. It was assumed that there was no real loyalty to employers or friends as far as their position in relation to the family was concerned. Family always won.
It always won because this was the permanent structure of one’s life. So too one could assume a form of betrayal from one’s employer and friends. There was always the tacit understanding that a company is only loyal to you as far as you are useful to them and only for the time you are needed. Same with friends. It was assumed that your friends, if their families decided, would move across the world without a second thought about you.
No one even saw this as a betrayal. It was not perceived as betrayal because this was the tacit understanding when engaging in employment or friendship. Indeed, the family was everything. To many, it was not merely the nuclear family but also the extended family. However, the nuclear family always took priority over the extended family. The extended family was never abandoned per say. They just became distant. I would posit that neglecting the extended family is a big mistake that a lot of people make but that is a video for another day.
The point is that family was blood. Everyone else were not. Every now and then a friend could become adopted blood. But those friends were rare. Adopted blood would be friends of the family who in turn belonged psychicly to the same category as extended family.
Anyways, the point is that the primary social relationship was not only assumed to be a part of your long term life plan but that it would be the dominant part of planning your future. The idea that a woman didn’t need a man or a man a woman was just absurd. It was impossible to create this life structure without a romantic partner of the opposite sex. Hence, it was absurd to lead a life that did not prioritize this primary relationship as an ends to one’s life.
Mothers would train their daughters to be wives. Fathers would train their sons to be husbands. Careers were about bringing status and finances to the family for the good of the children. People knew what they were aiming to build for themselves; a family. And why? Because we understood that ultimately that is the only real source of meaning to one’s life. Marriage was just a formalization ritual of this union which was meant to see the plan to the end. Marriage was never a goal in itself. It was a stepping stone to the family. It was a stepping stone for meaning and fulfillment.
This is really important to understand here. The family was angled at fulfillment. It was not merely some economic model for survival. Man cannot live on bread alone. If his spirit is crushed, he will put an end to his body willfully. Sure, the family can also drive a man to such an end, but the absence of a family is far more likely to lead to a bad end for both a man and a woman.