https://catapult.co/stories/the-families-we-choose https://catapult.co/stories/stranger-than-friendship

Lately, I catch myself stopping and looking too long at old couples I see on the street; it hurts my heart but I can’t look away when I notice two people in their eighties helping each other board the bus or carry groceries home. Sometimes these couples seem hardly to be in the world outside their unit of two. Their love has gone on long enough to create a sufficiency entirely on its own. I can understand wanting to refer to this kind of love as friendship—these are people whose love has survived past their bodies’ ability to act on desire. But whatever illuminates these fierce, shut-down universes of two is decidedly not friendship; that living memory, that present, hungry thing that survives into any old age is what I imagine when I imagine my own relationship forward.

We have the idea that, as our bodies decay, our love decays, too, out of the body and into repeated words, that what is at the bottom of love, when you remove all the decorations, the paint on the walls and the furniture in the room, is something soft and asexual, something sleepy and unconcerned with the body. But the text of romance, the material out of which the experience is built, is the body, its shape and movement, its resignations and betrayals. Friendship comforts us that we can love people without our bodies being at the center of that experience; romance allows us to resolve the way in which our bodies define our experience of the world.

A long partnership accumulates a private world in which one gets to be less presentable, less recognizably human, two people who have witnessed the grotesque expressions of one another’s bodies. One function of calling a marriage a friendship is to make it translatable to an outside observer, to reassure that this is something familiar. But when I imagine spending my life with my partner, the joy is of imagining years of accumulating a secret language, carrying around an experience built between us and offered to no one else.

https://catapult.co/stories/first-best-friend

I was a slow, dumb thing, a single syllable noun to her bright adjectives, and we stayed there all afternoon, talking about boys and about the future, coming up with something to talk about just so we could keep talking to each other. It is one of the first times I ever remember being happy, where happiness meant enough that I could notice it and name it, distinguishing a single day from all the others. People talk about first love and the transformative experience of initial romance. Love is how we climb out of the window of the family house and discover a world other than the one into which we were born. The shock of loving someone without being related to them jolts us into participation in the larger world. But my first experience of romance, the first love that propelled me into a world beyond the familiar, was this friendship. The kind of wild closeness I had with my first best friend still seems to be like the thing toward which romance strives and of which it often falls short.

The people we love in childhood sometimes come to stand in for the whole of childhood. They come to represent the entirety of what it felt like to live in future-tense verbs, when all we could do was draw up big, grand, architecturally impossible blueprints for what was to come, when doing so had no sadness to it, only hope—like something on which to bite down and grit your teeth, rushing into the violence of the waiting world with both hands open.

The early heyday of AOL coincided with the early heyday of our friendship. My parents had put parental controls on my computer, but hers hadn’t, and we would stay up in her house after they’d gone to bed, talking to strangers with screen names that more often than not referenced fictional vampires, telling them fake ages and names and stories, and shrieking behind our hands as they told us what they wanted to do to the bodies of these imaginary characters. We dissected what we’d typed, separating out disgust from interest. Even now, almost two decades later, every time I go to bed with my partner of three years, her ghost is there—the story of how I want anyone is still about her. People, like hometowns, become who we are, inescapable as the bends in our fingers and the way we pronounce words, our past built into the clumsiness and the grace that we carry into the world. The people we loved and to whom we no longer speak become the way we place the question mark in a sentence, the musical phrasing of our words, the pitch and octave of our laughter. The people we loved first are often people we end up hating, but they are as much who we are as ourselves. They remain in place underneath the noise, like the final sound of someone else breathing when the whole city goes to sleep. We wear our ghosts in our skin. It was a love so big it obliterated any kindness within it. We carried resentments from childhood into adulthood. Our friendship seemed to matter more than anything and at the same time to be based on nothing. We were unable to treat each other well as we got older, and we began a long process of breakups and reunions and betrayals. We no longer made sense to each other, but to give up this friendship was to give up a link to history, to surrender a coherent connection back to a starting point. When I was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven, we stopped speaking to each other, probably long after we should have done so, long after our insistence on continuing to love each other had done damage in the other’s life. It was ugly, but I did not know, with her, how to get out of the smallness I had felt in adolescence, how to apply any knowledge I had gained since then. This is one danger of first loving someone before loss and consequence teach us compassion. We have to start somewhere and often we are not ready for other people, for the shock at what they call up in us, for the want in our stomach that scratches its claws in the dirt. People talk a lot about whether men and women can be friends, as though the difficulty of friendship stopped there, as though the same question shouldn’t be asked about all friendship—can two women be friends, can two people be friends, can two teenage kids be friends right at the gateway to an adult kind of want, when unspecified, un-activated sex is shimmering around them like a heat haze in the air? Is there any love possible in which one person doesn’t want something from the other that isn’t quite the same thing that the other person wants from them? I don’t know, really, but I know I’ve never had a friendship with a man that was as difficult, or mattered as much, as this one did. Another friend once taught a college course called “Strange Friendship.” She explained that the course examined texts depicting “uncategorizable intimate relationships.” I had never felt so seen by a single phrase, or wanted so much to fold myself inside a pair of words. Here I had a term for this relationship that had mattered so much more to me than any boyfriend ever had, which had taught me the patterns of romance, but which was bigger than all the words that tried to contain it.

Much later, after she and I had stopped speaking, after I had stopped admitting her into the story of my own becoming, I ran into an awful ex-boyfriend of hers who had always hit on me when she was in the other room at parties; I dated him for a while. It was horrible and he was horrible, but what I wanted from him was merely the ability to get back to her. He had dated her at the time when her and my friendship had been running high and reckless and giddy, and we had learned the same languages from loving her, the same incessant pop culture references and turns of phrase, the same vitriol at the same small things and the same reflexive inside jokes, like old musicians playing scales before they’re awake. I stayed with her ex for a few months, both of us saturating in the memory of something we’d lost, allowing one another to believe what was gone could be called back. The people I love now and the way I love them feel smaller and less consequential than what I had with her, which is to say that I am better at loving them, capable of being careful with their hearts and able to tell when they are careful with mine. Maintaining boundaries no longer feels like a betrayal, and the lack of those boundaries no longer feels like proof of love. But nothing else is that friendship, a love that encompassed the whole swinging and unknowable bigness of that word. I have learned how to do things more conscientiously, how to weave compassion into the village-burning selfishness that desire seems to permit when we first encounter it. That’s a part of first love, too, what we learn and unlearn, the tenderness in other people, and also their trapdoors. My understanding of romance started with friendship, and always returns to it, this insistent strangeness, this country beyond the edge of the map where no one can find us.

https://thenewinquiry.com/a-heaven-of-hell/

Too often, stories about youth told by people who are not young focus, incorrectly, on romantic love. But traditional, romantic love is not what defines our formative years. As we emerge into, out of, and back and forth from adolescence, what defines these years of self-formation are the friendships.

People would mistake Hell and Verlaine for brothers, Hell recounts. The mistake is exciting because they aren’t. Their sameness is trained, chosen, rather than ordained from birth. This kind of love is a rebellion, a freedom from the strictures of home and family. Punk is friendship, not love. It is the friend with whom we are literally or figuratively cutting class and hiding behind the gym, smoking and making plans to run away. In counter-cultures that refuse and reject patterns of domesticity, tradition, and adulthood, we define ourselves far more by strange friendships, by relationships that mimic not the love our parents were (or were supposed to be) in, but the camaraderie we had with our childhood best friends. These are the people with whom we first discovered connections outside of the familial, ties outside of those dictated by blood and DNA. Hell describes staying up all night talking with Verlaine in the early days of their friendship. “There’s an eternal, godlike feeling to sitting with a good friend in the middle of the night, speaking low and laughing, lazily ricocheting around in each other’s minds,” he writes, then calls those nights, those endless conversations “the strongest dose yet of my favorite feeling: of leaving myself behind for another world.” He goes on to compare this feeling to the one he got from sex or drugs, but more so. The friendship with Verlaine is the strongest thing in an arsenal of rebellious behaviors by which Hell is defining himself and mapping out his own world. If punk is making up life for yourself, Verlaine and Hell make up life for each other, and make up the other for themselves. Relationships like these are always about self-definition. They teeter on the border between family love and romantic love, and come to define a time when everything is liminal, when everything is a negotiation of borders and boundary-spaces.

In the epilogue, Hell describes himself and Verlaine as “two monsters confiding.”