You can indeed have a perfectly healthy life with friends as your closest companions. It's really helpful to have a small number of partners who can take the primary position in an emergency, and it helps if they are in fact very close to you (ideally, cohabitating). There's no reason those people need to be sex partners, though it can be convenient.

You can construct your family in a lot of different ways. Having a lot of friends, some very close friends, and zero lovers is a perfectly valid one.

At least, it was becoming such. Legally, there is more and more push back against structures other than one male and one female, who are each other's sole and perpetual means of support.