the romance of friendship

on falling in love with your friends

I have internal debates with myself almost daily on which of my past romantic endeavors counts as my first love. Was it the one I had my first kiss with? The one that got along with my family? The one that took me on my first date? Or was it the one I was best friends with for years, with no occurrence of mutual confession, but we both knew there was something there?

The answer is, truthfully, none of them. My first love has always been my friends.

That includes past, present, and future. Don’t ask me how it makes sense, it just does. Some of my earliest lessons in love were taught by my childhood friends, and the lessons in love that I continue to learn are continuously being taught by the friends I have now—whether they are the same teachers I had when I was a kid or friends I have made within the past couple years. Friendship in my twenties doesn’t look exactly how I pictured it would while I was growing up, but that’s probably because the friends themselves are not the same people I was friends with when I was younger. I guess a lot has changed over the years, friendships included. I’ve changed, too. I’d like to think for the better.  

I’ve tried to keep as many people as I can from my childhood within a close vicinity, emotionally and physically, but as life does, it drifts you apart and leads you in different directions. And that’s okay. You know that age old proverb: If you love something, let it go, and if it comes back, it’s yours. If not, it was never meant to be? I don’t think that only applies to romantic love. It goes for platonic love, too. 

I know this is real, because it happened to me. I have brought a total of one friend from childhood with me into my adulthood. We’ve known each other for as long as I can remember—we grew up going to the same church, and had seen each other around since we were in preschool, probably, but we’ve officially known each other since we were about twelve. We always joke about this, but I remember pretty much everything, down to the t-shirts we were wearing and the book I had been currently reading when we first became friends, while she remembers absolutely nothing before the last six months or so (okay, so that’s an exaggeration, but you get my point). 

At a girls’ youth retreat, we established a friendship by bonding and obsessing together over the fandoms we had in common: Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, One Direction, 5SOS, to name a few. But after that week, we didn’t really continue close communication, because we had different friend groups. It wasn’t until three years later, when we were fifteen, that we got closer. We had other friends in common this time, so it worked. We formed a band, which we never actually did anything for and was really just an excuse to say we were in one. We were close like that for about two years, and then lost touch again simply because of differing current interests (things we actually both still enjoy to this day; we constantly joke about how opposite our interests are, but how there are a few core pieces of media where they intersect). There was no big moment that defined the end of our closeness, we just fizzled out. I don’t think either of us really cared because we were too self-involved to notice, just like every other teenager on the planet. Then, suddenly, I was seventeen-almost-eighteen, and before I even had my license, I had my first part-time job as a sales associate at a retail clothing store that catered specifically to middle-aged women. One day, I posted about our store having job openings on Facebook, and funnily enough, my best friend had been looking for a part-time job. It took a total of about thirty seconds of us being in the same room again to naturally return to the pattern of our friendship. The managers literally had to stop scheduling us together, because we are severely incapable of shutting up around each other. It’s been five years now, and two years ago since she moved two states away, but we’re still as close as we’ve ever been. 

Our friendship has become something so constant in both of our lives that it would take so much more effort to get rid of than to maintain. We’re both mature and secure enough in our dynamic to know that a week without talking doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world, it just means we’re busy gathering more lore to share whenever we debrief next. We went nearly three years without really talking at all, and once we were around each other again, we immediately picked back up where we left off with zero hesitation—I think we can survive a week or two. bell hooks puts it perfectly in her book, All About Love, an ode to love and all its forms: “We do not see each other as much as we once did, and we no longer call each other daily, but the positive ties that bind us remain intact.”¹

The ebb and flow of our closeness over the past eleven years eventually led us into an unbreakable bond that can stand—and has stood—the test of time, even as we entered young adulthood, which is when most people begin to drift from their high school friends and try to make a fresh start. I think the fact that we started our twenties together has actually strengthened our friendship, making us sort of latch onto each other like koalas on tree branches—afraid of what comes next, and not wanting to let go this time. The very existence of our friendship is tangible evidence and unmistakable proof of that old saying I mentioned earlier being true. It came back to us—it’s ours. We’re family now; stuck with each other, whether we like it or not. It’s just our luck that we happen to like it. 

I recently went through my first big breakup. Well, is it still recent if it happened almost seven months ago now? However you choose to consider it, the fact of the matter is that I lived through an entire romantic relationship from beginning to end. It was my first “serious” relationship, one where we actually labeled it as such, not just an entanglement where the feelings were mutual but nothing was ever seriously addressed—which was pretty much every other dynamic I’d had prior to this one. Having had a glimpse of love in the context of a romantic relationship, and also being the kind of person who makes connections and notices patterns, I have grown to realize that the romance we experience within our strictly romantic affairs is not all that different from the romance that occurs within the bounds of friendship. In fact, I believe that the love we feel for our friends is stronger, or at least it has the potential to be. Not in the sense that we feel lustful desire for the people we have friendships with, but simply because it is one of the purest forms of love.

There is something so inherently romantic to me about friendship. I have always felt this way. To love for the sake of love itself, without condition or physical expectation. Making the conscious choice to love and learn alongside someone for their heart and mind alone. Choosing them, over and over, everyday, simply because you enjoy the company they provide, even if you’re not in the same place, or even the same time zone. It’s finding pieces of them in everything, from characters in films, to songs you know they’d like; from jokes you know they’d find funny, to strangers in public you know they’d find attractive. It is the feeling of knowing that the people you choose to give your heart to are choosing to do the very same, without having to explicitly say so. True friendship is the result of a genuine mutual connection, one that each party puts the work in to keep alive, but it must come naturally. Love should never feel like something you are being forced to do. 

It’s beautiful, the way we make time for each other. I’m moving things around, clearing out space, rearranging the furniture of my life to make room for you. You’re doing the same. I’m not afraid to tell you: I love you. You’re not afraid to say back: I love you, too. It’s almost stupid how instinctively the words spill out of our mouths, and how soon, when it took us a ridiculous amount of time to be able to say it to our significant others without feeling the knots of unease twisting in our guts. And it’s not that we didn’t mean it when we said it to them, but it didn’t slip off the tongue nearly as easily as it did when spoken to each other. With you, I am never afraid that anything I do is too much, too weird, too tiresome. I know that you love me. It shows.

It shows in the way you respond to my frantic late night or early morning texts, the way we can go weeks without speaking and still fall back into a rhythm, the way we wish each other a happy birthday at exactly midnight, and the way we are the most insufferable people in any establishment we are in together. It shows in the way we are the first person we send half-drunken voice messages to, just to say that we love each other, amongst gibberish and nearly unrecognizable song lyrics, and in the way we send things out of nowhere just because it reminded us of each other. 

It shows in the way we can share things we’re proud of with one another, whether that’s something for work, school, or a piece of art we’ve made, without fear of judgment or ridicule when it matters most. It shows in the way we laugh at things that no one else finds funny, the inside jokes, and the things about each other that no one else knows. In the shared secrets, late night debrief sessions, and in supporting each other’s delusions. It shows in the way we lean on each other, in the way we can recall the past and the people we used to be, but also recognize that we have grown up since then, and that a friendship cannot survive on history alone. It shows in the way we understand that it takes putting in effort in the present to make sure we both know that this is something worth sustaining. 

You have taught me how to let love in and to accept it without having to first earn it. I feel safer and warmer after our conversations, like I’ve been recharged somehow. We are able to love each other in ways that family can, but also in ways that family cannot. We didn’t grow up in the same home, cycling around the same culdesacs, or running across the same front lawns. I wish we could have played together as kids, but isn’t it great that we get to figure out what it means to be adults together? We have been given the gift of getting to love each other for the people we are actively growing into, and will continue to become. 

Yes, I love you like family, but like family that I chose.

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possibly my favorite monologue of all time, from Frances Ha (2012)

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1. hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.