On my aunt’s golden wedding anniversary I asked her what it was like to spend half a century with one man. ‘It’s been wonderful, and, you know, I would have another 50 years,’ she replied. How beautiful I thought, to spend a lifetime with the person you love, weathering the worries of the world side-by-side.

We rightly celebrate these achievements of human love and kinship. But what if we also gave equal importance to other forms of relationships?