> But I think people usually consider romance to be more important than friendships.
It is not binary either choice. And ideally partners have shared friends.
One of the things you learn when being in situation I describes is value of causual connections and friends. And the need to work for them in various ways.
> The amount of women in stable heterosexual relationship is the same as amount of males in heterosexual relationship.
Yes, you're completely right. However (in the culture I'm in) men usually take action to ask out/talk to women. This asymmetry theoretically leads to men getting rejected until they're not, and women meeting unworthy men until they don't. So each gender has an entirely different perspective on the same dating market. Personally speaking, it is hard for me to fully understand my female friends' difficulties with dating (or friendships) because I've only experienced it as a male, so many things they have difficulty with are things I take for granted (this usually goes the other way too).
Unless there's a huge cultural shift, men and women will keep having completely orthogonal experiences and until then, empathy remains the biggest asset for us to treat each other with.