Edition 03: Romancing friends

Friend-love in a world that prioritises partner-love.

All I need in this life of sin is me and my girlfriend
- Jay Z

If you make a plural out of ‘girlfriend’, then you’d have the title of one of my memoirs. The stories encased in its clothbound shell would detail the most profound, consistent and secure love that have taken up residency in my atoms. The platonic love I’ve been swaddled in from the women I feel immeasurably blessed to have walking alongside me. There’ll be pages of moments between us that wouldn’t be seen as cinematic to most people, but to me tell a story of what it means to love and be loved in high-definition. My friendships are not casual. They aren’t just people I talk to for company at bus stops, then say goodbye when the bus comes. We ride all the buses of life together. They don’t include sex but they are romantic.

The texts and voice notes from my friends are my ceramic mug of tea in the morning, and spritz of lavender pillow spray come night. Rarely uttering hello or goodbye because our conversations are ones that have never found its alpha nor omega. A notification ping to remind us that there are people on this planet who wake up and go to sleep with our names pirouetting on their brain.

"How’s your heart today, babygirl?"
"Did you feel inspired?"
"Did you sleep well?"
"How did your dreams make you feel?"
"What did you see that moved you?"
"I’m here. I’ve got you."

We share the ordinariness of a weekday dinner or a spontaneous trip to Boots, and while one of us did not experience it firsthand, it feels so completely alive within us, just because the other one did. I want to know the damn temperature in Boots, how long she queued up for, did dinner give her a belly-ache…again? I want to know because I know her, for her world is as vivid as my own.

Flowers. Gooey brownies. Chocolate covered dates. Cookies. Grapes. A single banana. Spells of Camphor and Cloves. Boxes of Tissues. Socks. Lip Balm. Essential Oil Rollerballs. Panda merch. A Cut Out from Waitrose Magazine of 100 Things To Do with Hot Cross Buns.

All to be found in the Collective Friendship Archive of I-Saw-This-And-Thought-Of-You. To call these gifts feels like a word these objects don’t quite fit into. They’re sent with no reason, delivered by post, in-hand, to be rummaged and recovered in foundation-stained, crumby tote bags. The reasons behind them are as long as the archive itself. Sent when one of us has period cramps that feel like Pacman is eating away at your uterine wall. Sent when our bodies have weathered the glossary of ailments found on WebMD. Sent when hearts have felt battered by emotional bullets. They aren’t gifts. They are fragments of feeling that want to find a physical, bitesize expression. They are simply sent, ‘just because’.

But, also:

When we’re not sending each other things, we are sharing in time that we never loftily verbalise as sacrosanct but know is. Holding hands while we get pedicures, stealing each other’s scrunchies, watching her baby son trying to decipher the source of our cross-legged sofa gossip and taking it in turns to fill up our emotional support hot water bottles which threaten to cause toasted skin syndrome (seriously, look it up).

I know the spreading beneath the surface, growth-promoting roots of love because of the platonic love I’ve experienced. Fear not, dear reader, I have also been in romantic love. I mean, I guess it’s cute or whatever.

I joke. I have been in romantic love and I fucking loved it. Love held me hostage in a room decorated with neck kisses that pulsated into my bones and dinners where our conversations fed us more than any cacio e pepe ever could. In the honeymoon phase where your head is so filled with air, if someone said my name was Gertrude, I would have probably agreed; I felt like I was walking around with an IV drip of oxytocin. It was absolutely delicious.

Yet, through no fault of love itself, but the versions of love I found myself in, it often felt conditional on this unknown thing, that I couldn’t quite work out. I didn’t know if I was loved for all parts of me or if I was loved because I was just amenable. Went along with things. It was often the kind of love that makes you forget who you are because you want to melt into their flesh. There’s no space for two complete people when what you desire is to be one. One of you always has to go and I was always willing to slash pieces of myself off, so that I could fit into their world, their life, their skin.

I’m not rooting for romancing friends, because they’re less work than romantic relationships. We ask hard questions of each other. Grieve. Understand each other despite the unique space we occupy. We respect each other when our life paths don’t look the same. We hold each other through the most ickiest of situations, pushing, challenging and prodding each other into opportunities for growth and healing. I also know that sisterhood is not easy for all of us to find or feel at home in, based on past experiences or how we see our own role in it. I truly believe it’s worth just as much inner work and pursuing as we do with dating. Slide into some DM’s. Go to women’s circles and events.

I’m rooting for romancing friends, because there’s things that bother me about the role of friendships in our society.

- Why aren’t we encouraged to buy houses or have other serious committed living arrangements with friends who we have experienced the depths of life with? Yet, we do that with romantic partners after knowing them for 6-12 months, sometimes? Someone who we often don’t have much information about beyond our feelings for them, and we have long realised that feelings are indeed not facts, right?

- Why is it not recognised or understood to call your best friend (who will most likely still be with you beyond the divorce rate), your platonic life partner? Even though they might still be the first person you tell your best or worst news to; spouse or not.

- Why have we been taught that life is a mere waiting room until your “person” comes along? Why do so many of us have the same story of a friend who departed our lives as soon as they got a partner, and returns once they’ve broken up? A pattern so very familiar that it becomes understandable why the nuclear family that we are so conditioned to want can feel incredibly isolating and lonely. We’re sold the idea that once you’ve found your “person”, you don’t need anyone else.

We as individuals grow with community. Partnerships grow with community. Children grow with community. Our interconnectedness as a species demands that we expand beyond the smallness of these bubbles. There are 8 billion people here, let us keep expanding.

While I love men, desire men, see myself in short-term, long-term, and till the very very end with men, my love for my sisters will always join me in my romantic love. I am quite simply not prepared to lose the romance in my friendships or deprioritise the status of our connection. In the same way that I am not prepared to lose the romance of my solitude.

I spend hours writing and imagining living together in houses filled with women cooking, laughing, conversing, and making art. Maybe our romantic partners or lovers live there too, because what is love if not an ecosystem. Maybe they just come over to visit us over the light of sun-dimmed family-style dinners. Where we speak from the depth of the soil of us and not just the on-the-surface flowers. Where we share bookshelves, whisper our fears, and centre care. I always thought that a life like this could only ever exist as the plan B, because surely people don’t actually live like this? To quietly rebel is to unlearn, rethink, and question. It’s the freedom to live outside the lines that we ourselves never even created. This is no longer a dream that may go unfulfilled for me. It’s a choice that I will endeavour to realise. And that to me is a beautiful thing.

There can’t be only one way to do life.
I simply refuse.

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This post is dedicated to my friends, sisters, the loves of my life (you know who you all are). I am forever changed by our souls choosing each other to adore, eat good with and love during this lifetime. As our darling friend Carrie Bradshaw said: