Love Letter to My Best Friends

free use from Pixabay

Ann Patchett in Truth and Beauty: A Friendship writes, “Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.” Reading this was the first time I understood why my relationship with N and R is so special.

I am lucky enough to be very loved. A feeling I experience with gratitude. It’s difficult to express how thankful I am that I am not alone and very rarely lonely. I still keep in touch with my childhood best friend, I have a cabin full of queer folk that I talk to regularly, and I’ve made powerful friendships with women in the last few years.

My focus recently, however, has been on the first two adult friendships I experienced: N and R. We met in college; I was roomed in a studio with one of them. We’ve speculated that we wouldn’t have been friends if we hadn’t been forced to spend so much time looking at each other’s faces. At least, we wouldn’t have sought out friendships with each other, because the three of us are very different from one another. We’re from different backgrounds with very different upbringings. We didn’t share a ton of interests, at first. However, we did and still do all love TV, and the joy of us watching a show together is unmatched.

I hate Girls. There’s a laundry list of reasons why, I suppose, but the initial reason was this: I wanted something that represented the way N, R, and I love each other, and Girls was the furthest thing from it. It had been billed as these young women loving each other, but there was no real love that I could see. I needed some media representation of my obsession with my best friends, because I wanted to believe that we weren’t impossible. When I would tell my family that I planned to travel with N and R instead of coming home to visit, they didn’t understand. When I told them that I didn’t foresee getting married, but I imagined I would grow old with these other two parts of my heart, they laughed at me.

No matter how many representations of friendship between women we see, we’re told that these relationships are secondary to romance. They are the placeholders until we find our real forever partners, our husbands. I, the gay one in the triad, worried that maybe this was true. Maybe I would love them as my soulmates forever, but they would find men to replace me.

Broad City comes much closer to expressing the way N and I interact. I think we see a lot of ourselves and each other in those two characters, but there’s no good representation of R in that show. I could turn the three of us into caricatures to try to explain why I believe we’re magical, but that will not get to the root of it.

N read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series first, then handed the books off to me, and now R is reading them.

Elena Ferrente, Napolean series, via Elena Ferrante website

How excited I was to read these books! How helpful they were in satiating the craving for seeing us outside of us. N and R and I are all moving away from one another this year. We’ve lived apart for short stretches of time before, but the two of them are off to grad schools in different states, and I am planning to move in with my partner. “What will become of us?” I asked Ferrante. Her books told me to relax. The three of us are not the two characters of her novels, trapped by obligations to children or fiances, but we each feel untethered at times, unmoored in worlds of limitations and possibilities.

We are each of us flawed people. We have tempers and insecurities and failings. But we’ve grown and loved together and with each other and for each other. Now things are changing. We will no longer live within holding distance of one another. I want to watch and read about the endurance of friendship love and know that’s what will happen to us.

When tragedy has struck my life, they were right there. We all handled it differently, none of us well, none of us badly. We talked about it, and we ignored it, and we adjusted. They listened to me rehash the same fears over and over, and they never told me how tired they grew of my repetition. They just allowed me to be and to adjust and to change. That is the most powerful thing about our love: our ability to allow each other to change.

Without them I don’t think I’d be capable of cultivating the vulnerable, honest friendships I now enjoy with other women. Without their love I don’t think I would have been whole enough to fall in love with my partner. Through my love of the two of them I allowed myself to heal years of damage and fear. Our friendship has made me stronger, less afraid, and, frankly, a better person. There is a lot of myth and mystery around the idea of women’s friendships. We’re told they’re competitive, or temporary, or shallow. Instead, I’ve found them to be life-giving, full, romantic, limitless acts of love.

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Al Rosenberg

Al Rosenberg

Gay weirdo. Talk to them about tiny games, big books, trash, and all things illness.

3 thoughts on “Love Letter to My Best Friends

  1. I love this so much! I remember craving friendship with women growing up thanks to series like The Babysitters Club, the Sleepover Friends, the Saddle Club, etc. But I never seemed to find that. It wasn’t until I got to college and joined a sorority that I found something close to it, and now, in my 30s, when I’ve had the chance to see friendships stretch and break or grow stronger based on hardships and distance, I appreciate these friendships all the more. They are just as precious and formative as the romantic relationships we find in our lives for sure.

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