always on your side

friendship is magic

Housekeeping: Sophia and I are helping CAFE ANNE, one of my favorite Substacks, match her subscribers!! There are also other fun matchmaking experiments that will be revealed soon.

T and I said we’d be friends at St Jardim in 2023. It was springtime and she told me she’d decided to be vulnerable with me, starting now. And that we were going to be close. I was a little bemused because she had not so far been particularly vulnerable at all, and I was wondering if the change really could just happen like that, or how it would feel. But it really did just happen just like she predicted. I moved to California, we hung out when we visited each other’s respective cities, we became friends. In the Waymo on my way to see her yesterday I was so excited I had heart palpitations.

At the party the topic came up: can men and women be friends? P said that she didn’t think they could, that male/female friendships could never be as unboundaried as her friendship was with me. Which is probably true: we went to Japan for a week and shared the same hotel room, which is not something I can imagine doing with any male friend. But everyone else in the conversation pointed out that the presence of boundaries didn’t mean a friendship wasn’t real.

Some of my best friends are guys, and at this point I’ve known them for about 10 years. I have matching tattoos with a couple, C and B. At this point they feel like family, as in: I couldn’t imagine us breaking up for any reason. We drift, and we go through different seasons, but the relationship has proven so extremely durable. In friendships you don’t often explicitly talk about values, but we have the same values. The same orientation towards work and love. And also a thousand subtler things. We understand each other’s dreams, big and small, and we can really talk. I think that’s what it comes down to: I can really talk to my friends, and I can talk to them through everything.

Friendship brings out the best in me, and sometimes I fear that romantic relationships bring out the worst. As a friend, I’m steady, warm, receptive. As a partner, I’m only sometimes that. At my most difficult, I fear that I couldn’t possibly be lovable. But that’s too simplistic of a narrative, so let me try again.

Here we go: over the years I’ve sometimes called my friends, crying, anxious, and let them be my anchor to reality. The unconditional acceptance they model to me is how I would like to show up in every moment of my life, in each important relationship. In reality, there are plenty of times I don’t show up like that, when I crack under stress, when I am not patient and kind. It’s easier to be generous to your friends, because you have some level of remove from them—they are usually not pressed up against you in your worst moments, privy to your most destructive tendencies. But friends are still our first and sometimes best model of someone who chooses to be always on your side.

*

I don’t have all the answers. I think it’s fair to say we’ve gotten into this mess together. The way I experience love is totalizing, and I fear that what I ask from it is overwhelming to you. But you’re still here.

T and I were talking about the phrase, Nothing you do could make me love you any less. Though hearing that is the ultimate blessing, there are times when it feels like a curse. Don’t you sometimes wish that you could shut a door in your mind and block me out? Aren’t you sick of thinking about me by now, don’t you wish I would just give up on the whole thing?

Friendship was what taught me that love is an endurance sport with no finish line. You keep picking up the phone and sending your dumb texts and ordering crudo and white wine at New American restaurants and seeing movies together and asking about their families and sometimes things change and sometimes they stay the same. Disenchantment, reenchantment. In that way romantic and platonic love are the same. As long as nobody quits, we’re still in it together.

*

Sometimes I show up at dinner thinking, what are we going to talk about? But we always have something to talk about. I am on your side during the good times and the bad. The people you hate are the people I hate. I love when you send me crazy emails and crazy texts and when you call me at weird times. I would never let anyone say a single bad thing about you in front of me. Only I am allowed to complain about you. And our other friends who love you, because you have to love someone before you’re allowed to hate them.

We don’t have many good theories about friendship, or a lot of scripts. It’s so different from dating, which is so scripted it can feel stifling, where so much of the possibility space is prescribed or proscribed. The guy should pay on the date. The girl shouldn’t make the first move. You should respond to a text in this amount of time. Since I started matchmaking, a ton of people have told me: I prefer to get to know someone as a friend first. Dating apps feel so unnatural and stilted. I think this is because everything feels more organic when there’s not a script. When I’m not playing a role, when I can be just who I am and you love me anyway, everything feels more real.

Sometimes, the lack of a good script can lead to complete confusion. Some of the most heartbreaking moments of my life have been when a longtime friend retreats. I’ve realized in the aftermath that I saw them as so necessary—so integral to the infrastructure of my life. Our connection was more than meaningful to me. But maybe they didn’t know that because we never talked about it, or maybe they saw it a different way. Am I allowed to ask them to come back? Am I allowed to be mad? It’s hard when there’s nothing in our culture that tells me what to do.

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When I was 19 I moved to San Francisco. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I was pursuing—love, luck, fortune, or fate. I now see myself as a girl in search of a great friend group. As a teenager I was obsessed with two shows: Sex and the City and Nana. To this day, I can’t watch a single episode of Nana without crying. Both shows touch on multiple topics—romance, sex, dreams, work, heartbreak—but to me they’re fundamentally about the life-changing magic of having someone on your side. Who sees you at your most hysterical and laughs it off. Who gets annoyed at you but still sticks it out. Who rolls their eyes at your bad choices and applauds your good ones.

At a holiday party last year, a guy told me that he believed friendship should be easy. He was close to his family, and he had a partner he loved very much. Those were the relationships in his life that he had the capacity to be challenged by. He wanted his friendships to be light, loose, simple.

For many people, friendship’s appeal lies in its relative lack of complications. No taxes or laundry, no sex, no fighting. People are allowed to walk away and no one gets mad. You get to choose how much you opt in. When contrasted with romantic relationships, which at their worst can resemble a merry-go-round in Hell, they seem all upside.

I don’t think I’m so good at that kind of friendship. My friendships, if they persist for long enough, have a way of getting weighty. But heaviness is also part of the magic—it’s hard to love someone or something without getting in too deep. I think the right people will follow you into the water, and teach you how to swim.