1DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP
Platonic love’s possibilities, then and now
The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.
—ELENA FERRANTE
In 2017, five months after moving to Washington, D.C., I walked to the narrow back room of a bar called Lost & Found to celebrate the birthday of my roommate’s best friend. The room was an industrial shoebox, its low ceiling, exposed brick wall, and concrete floor trapping the sounds of the crowded space and forcing us to shout. On the other side of the room was a person who, even from far away, I found magnetic. She didn’t resemble the other D.C. young people at the bar on this Wednesday night, their blazers and button-downs not fitting quite right, like costumes for a performance of adulthood. In her pastel sleeveless blouse and snug pencil skirt, she had the posture of a dancer—if that dancer were also running a boardroom meeting—and expressive gestures. Later, I managed to pull her into conversation, and I noticed the clear diction and melody in her voice.
Slightly tipsy, I blurted out what could have been a pickup line: “You’re a singer, aren’t you?”
She was surprised I had detected that after only a few sentences of conversation. In fact, she sang as a soprano in two choirs.
Her name was M. Glasses of wine in hand, we talked about my amateur performing arts experience as a kid; how she came from a musical family and got an early start with piano and voice lessons. Our throats sore from raising our voices over the din of the bar, we left the party after a couple of hours and walked to the metro. During the four stops it took to get to our neighborhood, we discovered that we lived only a few blocks away from each other. After exchanging numbers, I left M off at her house and felt giddy as I walked to mine.
I quickly discovered that M has no chill. Or at least, she had no self-consciousness about showing enthusiasm. Soon after we parted that night, I got a voice memo from her. I would discover that M’s voice memos were the audio equivalent of her emails to friends, smart and stream-of-consciousness. She had an ability to turn observations about the tiniest things into intriguing questions. Between us was a blizzard of ideas—from books and articles we were reading and details about the important people in our lives, toggling easily between the interpersonal, emotional, and intellectual.
Three days after we met, M invited me to a casual weekly gathering she held at her house that introduced me to what I would come to think of as her “extroverted introversion.” M often brings friends together but might also opt to celebrate her birthday by taking herself to a movie, alone. At this gathering, she merged the two impulses by convening friends to talk over a meal she’d cooked for us and then, after lighting a candle, have us curl up in her living room and read our own books in silence.
It took us little time to introduce each other to the people and spaces that mattered to us. M became a regular enough presence at my office that she cracked jokes with the security guard. About a month after we met, M invited me to join her family at an outdoor jazz festival in D.C. We dropped by each other’s homes with the effortless frequency that before then had only seemed possible on sitcoms.
It was all a magnificent surprise. I didn’t expect to feel the exhilaration I found with M, because it didn’t occur to me that those feelings could strike more than once. I met her two and a half years into a relationship with my now husband, whom I’ll call Marco. I felt fortunate to have found a partner so young and assumed that I had made a trade: in exchange for finding my partner at twenty-two, I wouldn’t get to feel what it’s like to fall in love again—unless something went wrong between Marco and me. But here were those same feelings, just shorn of sexual desire.
In certain ways, M and Marco were similar: analytical, disciplined, charming. But while Marco was steady—his lows not very low at all, and his highs not off the charts—M had the dial turned up. She was an easy crier, and she couldn’t contain the evidence; when her tears evaporated, rings of salt formed under her eyes. She gave such wise advice that therapists I went to disappointed me—it felt absurd to spend time and money talking to people whose insight was inferior to hers. Whereas Marco sought beauty by spending time outdoors, M looked to the stage.
The intensity of my friendship with her was without any real precedent. I’d had a best friend in elementary school, who moved away. I had another in middle school: we took acting and singing classes together and had sleepovers most weekends, making Easy Mac and recording goofy videos. I came to feel like a member of her extended family, but after we grew apart in high school, I tended to rely on several close friends, not a single person, and I never found someone who made me want to open up as I later would to M. In high school, I struggled to talk about what was going on: that my mom had lost her job during the recession; my dad hadn’t been working for years; my parents were functionally separated, and the main reason my mom stayed in the same home as my dad in New Jersey was the unaffordability of moving out now that she was unemployed. I couldn’t talk about how despair could overtake my mom and how my dad, who had been such an adoring father to me, could scare me with his ire and bitterness toward my mom.
During my junior year, I became close to a girl named Sophia, who was a grade above me. I shared more with her than with other people, but I still couldn’t broach some of my issues at home. Sophia also helped me put my finger on something I wanted, as she had a best friend that she spoke to all the time and could call at any hour. She and her friend were a recognized unit. I approached that kind of connection in graduate school, when I made a best friend, Anna, though we later moved to different cities. Then I met M, to whom I eventually became so close that the term best friend seemed inadequate.
On New Year’s Eve in 2017, M and I cohosted a party at my house for about a dozen friends, some of whom were passing through town and didn’t know the other guests. Like a poet who enjoys the creative constraints of rhyme scheme, M takes pleasure in devising structured social gatherings. M arranged for our friends (and she herself) to play music and led people through a writing exercise: a series of prompts to reflect on the past year and to look forward. She asked us: What vows do we want to renew to ourselves?
Her vow to herself was to ask for help more. “Every time you begin a new project, personal or professional, you should start by asking, Who could help me with this?” she said. My vow was meant to reduce the alienation I felt at my large office—where I felt reserved, far removed from my social self—by reaching out to a new person each month whom I wanted to know better. To be with M was to be pushed to grow, and I would later see this element of our friendship mirrored in the account of a couple’s romantic relationship. One of the partners, on her blog, described a core principle in their relationship as “Mutually Assured Non Complacency.”
Through M, I experienced a kind of vitality and besottedness in friendship that I hadn’t had before. I relished it all. I wanted to understand how her mind worked, to mimic the exuberant way she moved through the world. And I felt privy to a secret: that it’s possible to find the headiness and security that we associate with romantic relationships within a friendship.
“Secret” is hardly hyperbole, because as M and I got closer, we found that our friendship didn’t have a ready-made label. We felt like a species that biologists had yet to classify. We weren’t merely “friends.” Even “best friend” felt like a downgrade; our commitment exceeded that of most best friends we knew. We would exchange voice memos multiple times per day and regularly bcc each other on important work emails. We introduced our friends to the other, and though we maintained our own ties, a network of mutual friends grew.
If I wanted someone else to get to know M, I’d ask her if I could extend an invitation to one of the parties she hosted every few months. At these parties, M’s musically talented friends performed pieces that traversed centuries, genres, and continents, from nineteenth-century classical choral music to African children’s songs to original folk songs. The setting was casual: dozens of us would sit cross-legged on the living room floor and a five-dollar bouquet from Safeway, M’s décor splurge, would rest on the mantel. But she carefully choreographed the parties with a set list, hours of practice, and a strictly-adhered-to party end time. (At one party, a friend of M’s gifted her a banner that read “Please leave by 9.”) One of M’s shticks as emcee was to explain that a language her parents speak has no exact translation for the word singer; there’s a cultural expectation that everyone sings, so it would be odd for someone to describe themselves as “a singer” or say, “I’m not a singer,” as people do in the United States. M carried that idea into the party. Toward the end of the night, she would break us into sections, directing us to sing a round together, or she’d lead us in a well-known song like “Seasons of Love.” You could have the singing voice of a raccoon and still feel like you contributed to the dulcet tones.
She also cared for me as no other friend had, blending the ebullience of a fairy godmother with the occasional eat-your-vegetables entreaty of an actual mother. More than once, when I had a cold, she came over to my house with a tote bag full of lemons, fresh ginger, and black tea, which she turned into a concoction on the stove. She made me finish the steaming drink, even as I winced from the acidity and complained like a child. She talked me through family difficulties, sent me email reminders to find a therapist, and reduced the self-consciousness I felt when talking about sex. It would have been plenty if she simply made me comfortable discussing events and thoughts that I had previously kept hidden. But through her open-mindedness and spirit of exploration, M helped me ask myself questions I wouldn’t have asked before and identify thoughts and feelings that I hadn’t yet given the soil to grow.
I knew that I was her person, too. On a couple of nights when she was having a hard time, I went to her house and held her. I slept over, overheated by her faux shearling blanket. I saw how she worried about her family members and about her tower of student debt. She often struggled to balance her wonky, analytical interests with her creative ambitions as a musician and writer—she was like a house that would short-circuit if too many appliances were on at once; she had to choose which to turn on at any given time. We talked often about how she could keep these two essential parts of herself running.
Four months after we met, M ended a call between us by saying, “I love you.” I lobbed back, “I love you, too,” in an aw-shucks tone. I was sitting next to a stranger on an Amtrak train—a setting that made it hard for me to take in those words and earnestly say “I love you” back. I regretted that I couldn’t muster more sincerity, because there was no question that I loved M.
A couple of days later, I tried to parse in my journal what it was that we had been building together. I didn’t know how to think about our friendship, I wrote. And without a framework, I went on, “I don’t have an easy way to describe our friendship to others, which feels crazy because our friendship has got to be the most important development since moving to D.C.”
* * *
I may not have had much personal precedent for a friendship like the one M and I developed, but the historical record reveals plenty.
On the floor of Merton College’s chapel in Oxford, England, beneath stained glass windows that depict apostles, a flat, ten-foot-long brass monument marks the joint crypt of John Bloxham and John Whytton. The men stand side by side, garments draping down to their feet, each holding their hands in prayer as if they’re a pair of saints. Why were they buried in this chapel—together—and memorialized as a pair? The most direct answer is that Whytton arranged for it to happen. He provided funds for the monument and the tomb after Bloxham died in 1387. He also asked to be buried with Bloxham.
After visiting this memorial and others like it, the British historian Alan Bray considered a radical possibility: maybe they were evidence of a long-forgotten practice of same-sex marriage. After all, their design mimicked those for husbands and wives in medieval English churches. Other monuments to same-sex pairs included the marriage knot that appears on monuments for spouses. Some featured family shields, suggesting the merging of two lineages.
It took decades for Bray to arrive at a different conclusion, that these men had a type of relationship that is now foreign to us: a societally recognized, committed relationship built around platonic love. Intent on interpreting the past on its own terms, Bray determined that Europeans in earlier centuries had a different conception of friendship from our own. Friendship was not a private relationship, as it’s now understood to be, but one of public significance, regularly honored in churches.
Bloxham and Whytton’s path to their resting place in the chapel began around 1364, when they met as young men at Merton College. At the time, Whytton was likely a young scholar and Bloxham a fellow at the college. Their friendship spanned more than twenty years. Besides the fact that they were buried in a church, a detail in the tomb’s monument elevates their friendship to a spiritual plane. The engraving of the name Johannes seems to identify Saint John the Baptist as the men’s spiritual godfather, which would make Bloxham and Whytton spiritual brothers.
Bloxham and Whytton appear to have followed a practice that was common in medieval and early modern England, in which men were ritually turned into brothers and, afterward, were expected to support each other for the rest of their lives. Sworn brotherhood had deep roots. Monks in the fourth to seventh centuries would sometimes pair off, each member of the duo taking responsibility for the other’s spiritual progress. In the sixth century, two monks from Syria, Symeon and John, had such a deep connection that they shared the same visions. Ultimately, they left the monastery they had joined in Jordan and became desert hermits together, but before they parted, the abbot kneeled, each man on either side, and prayed for them. The ritual between these two men, according to Claudia Rapp, a Byzantine scholar at the University of Vienna, was the inaugural act of adelphopoiesis—literally, the making of brothers.
For centuries in the East, these rituals took place in Christian churches: two friends would enter a church, place their hands on the Gospel, one on top of the other, and the priest would say prayers over them. After embracing, the men would be seen as “brothers” for the rest of their lives. Adelphopoiesis was practiced by monks and laypeople in the Byzantine Empire, and limited evidence suggests there were also sworn friendships between pairs of women and between women and men. Historians have found similar forms of brotherhood—known alternately as wed brothers or blood brothers and celebrated with a variety of rituals—throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Though men could enter into these relationships for instrumental reasons, such as to secure a strategic alliance between families, many men were driven to become brothers out of deep fondness for one another. Sworn brotherhood could exist alongside marriage. Sometimes men chose to be buried with their sworn brothers rather than their wives.
The very features that make such intense friendships seem out of place today were, at other times in history, seen as normal and laudable: the affection, devotion, and ritual they involve; the way friends operate as a unit; how the friends are integrated into each other’s families of origin. One of the earliest pieces of written literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is a paean to an inseparable male friendship. The Old Testament features stories of extreme devotion among friends: David, the future king of Israel, bound himself by covenant to his friend Jonathan “because he loved him as his own soul.” Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers used language much like this to describe friendship. In ancient Rome, a person might refer to a friend in terms that people would now find appropriate for a spouse, such as “half of my soul” or “the greater part of my soul.”
In antiquity and the early modern period, family, friend, and spouse were not ranked in a clear hierarchy, and a friend could take on roles that we now assume would only go to a relative or spouse. This was true throughout the world. Friends in late medieval France and elsewhere in the Mediterranean could join their households in a legal contract known as affrèrement (roughly translated as “brotherment”). They promised to live together and share “un pain, un vin, et une bourse”—one bread, one wine, and one purse—and usually became each other’s legal heir, withdrawing that right from blood relatives. Sworn brothers in China contributed to the dowry of a sworn brother’s daughter, to the cost of a funeral in a sworn brother’s family, and had mourning obligations when the sworn brother’s parents died. This kind of relationship blurred the lines between friend and kin.
Though sworn brotherhood used the language of family, it resembled marriage. Both relationships involved rituals that created kin by promise rather than biology, publicly tying families together. Both were enacted before witnesses and sanctified by taking Holy Communion. In fact, these friendships were often referred to as “wedded brotherhoods”—in Middle English, wed meant a pledge or covenant and didn’t exclusively refer to a “wedded” husband or wife. Men might speak to their friends using terms associated with marriage or kinship. The seventeenth-century English King James I and the first Duke of Buckingham referred to each other in their letters with a medley of terms, including “friend,” “husbande,” “wyfe,” and “chylde,” suggesting that their friendship blended each of these relationship types. Bright lines didn’t separate marriage, family, and friendship from one another.
Today, friends cannot walk into a house of worship or clerk’s office and “wed” each other, turning themselves into siblings in the eyes of the community. But it would be a mistake to assume that people have always organized relationships as we do now, with stark dividing lines and rankings. As incoherent as language like “wedded brotherhood” may seem to our eyes, Bray, the historian, writes, “The confusion lies not in these terms from the past but with us.”
* * *
There was nothing new about the kind of closeness I found in my friendship with M, but the terms to describe it and rituals to commemorate it had disappeared. Without those forms of social recognition or awareness of the history I now know, I felt like she and I were surveying unmapped territory. One afternoon, a friend named Adam suggested a different way to think about my friendship with M. He asked me how my relationships with Marco and M differed. I had to sit with the question for a moment.
Marco and I had met at Oxford, where we were both in master’s programs. He struck me as serious—our first conversation involved a discussion of the fall of the Soviet Union—so I was surprised to find that this bookish guy who wore a collared shirt as his casual attire made generous use of emojis in online messaging. Only months after we started dating, he conveyed to his dad how our relationship felt different from other ones he’d been in. Marco, who once considered pursuing an ambitious political career, told his dad that he could see himself instead standing in the wings, watching and supporting me. When he followed me to the United States to get a Ph.D., he was so concerned about making the best use of his time that he kept a spreadsheet tracking his activities in six-minute intervals, yet I’d learn that he can also sit with a friend’s toddler and watch him uncap and re-cap markers, happily engrossed, for what seems to me like an eternity.
Marco isn’t the type to use terms of endearment unless the purpose is to tease. He calls me “Barnacle,” sometimes shortened to “Barney,” because of the way I hug him and occasionally refuse to detach myself. (M, meanwhile, has hugged me tightly enough to make my back crack, and I once had to ask her not to hold my hand while walking around my office, which she had done unthinkingly.) Whereas I’m a geyser of affectionate words, true to his Dutch heritage, Marco shows affection through his actions.
Marco and M expressed themselves differently, but I felt that the fundamentals of my romantic relationship with Marco and my friendship with M were similar. The obvious distinction was that I had sex with Marco and didn’t with M. My friend Adam told me that I was polyamorous—an assessment he felt comfortable making, as someone who had experience in polyamorous relationships. As he saw it, Marco and M were both partners to me; my partnership with M just didn’t involve sex. The framing of polyamory didn’t speak to me, though. I associated polyamory with sexual relationships, and I believed others did, too. What use would it be to describe myself as having polyamorous relationships with Marco and M if other people understood that to mean something it wasn’t? Though Adam’s suggestion didn’t fix my nomenclature problem, his comment that I have two partners gave me outside validation that my friendship with M was significant, in some ways closer to a committed romantic relationship than a conventional friendship.
Up until that point, M had been a bigger day-to-day presence in my life than Marco was. He was getting his Ph.D. at a school that’s a six-hour train ride away from D.C., and we saw each other every other weekend. Marco was glad I had found someone who quickly gave me a feeling of rootedness in my new city and whose company he enjoyed, too.
Copyright © 2024 by Rhaina Cohen
