It’s almost Valentine’s Day when we will be surrounded by loud love. Red roses, candlelit dinners, staged affection posted online. Love, apparently, must be visible, romantic, and preferably photogenic.

But some of the most enduring forms of love don’t show up with flowers. They arrive quietly. And they are almost never celebrated on Feb. 14.

Friendship is one of them.

Well, a group of friends, mostly couples in their senior years, celebrated Valentine’s week without those photogenic or Instagramable moments. They went camping. Driving through kilometers of desolate landscape of sand trails left by Pinatubo’s eruption decades ago, stirring a whirlwind of sand in its path, crossing a river, dodging tree trunks — and finally reaching a surreal landscape of rolling green grass, pine trees, and a serene lake.

This is Lake Mapanuepe in Zambales, a truly hidden paradise visited only by the adventurous with 4x4 vehicles, and a few brave 4x2 drivers, all of them with the spirit of Indiana Jones.

Far from the restaurants where most couples will dine on Valentine’s Day, this group who call themselves the Senior Car Campers Plus seek the outdoors to celebrate friendship. Under the stars, the chilly wind of the lake threatening to blow away tents and awnings, these senior citizens cook meals on neatly-assembled kitchen tables, lay the sumptuous food on tables extended by coordinated planning, and sit on camp chairs each brings along.

The Great Outdoors is what draws these seniors together. Total strangers before they met in some campsite years ago, they have now become friends and act like neighbors, although their home addresses are scattered around Metro Manila.

This week, and on Valentine’s Day, they celebrate friendship, a form of love that hardly attracts attention online. To me — and I am sure, to many of you — friendship has kept you grounded many times in your life. To have a friend who knows your voice well enough to hear the bad day before you say a word. The one who sends a message that simply reads — “Are you okay.” You have a treasure when you have a friend who remembers how you take your coffee, your irrational fears, and your old stories — and listens to them again and again.

Friendship is love without performance. With the red roses and chocolates. There’s no public milestones for it, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of knowing each other’s worst habits. And because it does not follow the familiar romance narrative, we often treat it as secondary — important, yes, but somehow not central.

That’s a mistake.

Friendships are the relationships that hold us together when romantic love falters, or ends. They are the ones who survive distance, heartbreak, career changes, parenthood, grief, and personal reinvention.

Unlike romantic love, friendship is rarely about possession. It allows space. It doesn’t panic when you change. It understands that silence doesn’t always mean absence. All it asks for is something simple — “Be there when I need you.”

There’s humor in friendship too. The kind that only exists when you’ve known someone long enough to laugh without explaining the joke. With the seniors who’ve shared only about two years together, the laughter comes from jokes about appetite or one’s build that prevents one from setting up an awning. All that said with affection, the banter goes on and on from one campsite to the next. The laughter refuses to leave.

With this group, they linger together from one campsite to the next, until, as one of them said, “We run out of clothes and food.” That’s not extraordinary; with friends, lunch extends to dinner, and cocktails to midnight snacks.

And yet, on Valentine’s Day, friendships are politely ignored. We don’t buy chocolates for the people who sat with us through uncertainty. We don’t celebrate the ones who stayed when we were not particularly lovable.

Maybe because friendship feels too ordinary to honor. Or we assume it will always be there, quietly waiting.

But friendship is not accidental. It is built and maintained. It requires time in a world obsessed with speed. It needs presence in a culture addicted to distraction and multitasking. It requires listening without giving advice, honesty but not cruel comments, and care without conditions.

That’s not small love.

If romantic love is fireworks, friendship is the steady light that shows you where you are. It doesn’t overwhelm. It stays long after the noise — or the camping ends.

So maybe this Valentine’s week, we expand our definition of love. Maybe we acknowledge that some of the deepest connections in our lives do not arrive wrapped in romance. They arrive in shared silence — when we set up camp, each quietly assembling tents, kitchens, beds. They come with old conversations of repeated jokes, and whimsical dreams of what one wants to buy for the next camping. It mingles in the comfort of being fully known to strangers who now sleep in tents beside mine.

Some loves do not ask for roses. They ask for time — to get away from the comforts of the city to some desolate campsite. They ask for honesty — to ask for help to set up a new tent and not pretend one can do it all by himself. They ask for staying – through three days to seven days in two to three campsites.

Those quiet friendships deserve to be celebrated! This week, I celebrated friendship with Lawrence Dy, Danny and Beng Yan, Dean and Nette Baltazar, George and Josie Coscolluela, Zaldy and Claire Ramonez, PJ and Gay Beltran. We missed Bodz Rivera and Richard Siy, regular campers who couldnt get away for the week. (Email: [email protected])