A Brief History of the BFF

New book explores possibilities 2 cool 2 B 4 gotten

Creatures, I am mostly in the throes of nonprofit launching (from Gay Catholic Whatnot to Gay Catholic Throes I guess), and even my fun reading was actually a book I’ll be reviewing for cash. Secret subtext: I am still reviewing books for cash… pay me cash to review books. I should have some fun stuff for you all next week, but in the meantime, here’s a review I’ve had kicking around for a while, of a book I think many of you will enjoy.

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Rhaina Cohen was at a bar when it happened. A stranger caught her eye across the crowded room. She felt herself mysteriously drawn to this new person—and soon became enraptured by the woman’s “posture of a dancer,” “expressive gestures,” the “melody in her voice.” Cohen is “smitten”; she starts to talk about this woman so much that she finds herself censoring her speech so she doesn’t come across as obsessed. The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center is about the unexpected thing that happened next.

Cohen already identified as bisexual, so it might have seemed like the path ahead was obvious: dating, romance, sex, maybe marriage. “A relationship.” But Cohen discovered that her longing for “M.,” and M’s love for her, weren’t shaped that way. The best shape of their relationship was friendship—and yet “[e]ven ‘best friend’ felt like a downgrade,” because “our commitment exceeded that of most best friends we knew.” Cohen entered an unacknowledged subculture: the community of those who have experienced a friendship so deep that they hoped it would shape the rest of their lives.

Cohen weaves the story of her friendship with M. through the book’s 300 pages, but this isn’t a memoir. It’s an exploration of a phenomenon that emerges across millennia, from East to West: friendships that become kinship. Cohen profiles men learning to overcome their fear of being too close to another man’s body; women raising children together; even friends seeking legal recognition for their bond. (Full disclosure: Cohen interviewed me as part of her background research, and one of her subjects, Art Pereira, is a friend of mine, but in a normal way, not a kinship way. Lowkey a friend.)

The physicality of Cohen’s “friendship at first sight” suggests the permeability of the boundaries we draw between attraction, friendship, romance, and love. Cohen discovers that friendships “can contain the thrill and tenderness that most people only expect to find in relationships that involve sex.” The psychologist Lisa Diamond suggests that many, maybe most, queer women have experienced at least one “passionate friendship” that can include “inseparability, cuddling, hand-holding, and preoccupation.” We create cultural categories, like “romance,” which connect love and sex in one way—and then our experiences disrupt those categories, and we have to kludge together new ones (“bromance,” “lesbros,” “framily”).

Although intellectual types often praise friendship for its freedom, for the lack of rules and scripts which they believe distinguishes friendship from marriage, Cohen discovers that our society does have rules for friendship—all designed to make sure we never love our friends too much. The mother of one interviewee wished that her son would just date someone, so he’d have the “emotional wholeness” it didn’t seem like his “platonic life partner” could provide. Some subcultures enforce these rules more cruelly than others: Cohen explores the friendship between Art and Nick Galluccio, a gay and a straight man who both worked as youth pastors in “conservative [Protestant] congregations.” When Nick and Art went on a webinar to discuss their experience of living together and considering one another brothers, internet comments were so vicious that Art had to resign his position and even started to question whether the commenters were right that he was a predatory homosexual: “Am I a danger to my students?” But even subcultures that don’t punish men for showing love to other men can assume that devoted friendships are clingy, codependent, or immature, and that real adult love is found in romantic and sexual relationships.

This view damages both friendship and marriage: “While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them”—by expecting what one interviewee calls “one-stop shopping,” in which our spouse must fulfill all of our complex emotional and social needs. And our skepticism of committed friendship is also a historical outlier. Cohen uncovers the ancient bonds of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, David and Jonathan; she explores fourth-century monastic pairs, sworn brotherhood in China, and the lifelong love of two Black women activists in the early 20^th century. (Cohen handles the question of sex gracefully, arguing that historians have often refused to acknowledge the possibility of homosexuality but that we now run “the risk of overcorrection” by refusing to acknowledge the possibility of nonsexual love.)

Others is vivacious, optimistic, curious; Cohen assumes that even culturally-distant or unusual ways of life can hold lessons for more normal contemporary readers. Though she obviously doesn’t share Nick and Art’s embrace of what’s sometimes called “a traditional Christian sexual ethic,” she portrays their faith with the same nuance and sympathy she brings to the battle of “chosen families” to be recognized during the AIDS crisis.

But Cohen’s praise for anything that opens space for alternative forms of kinship and love can also make her boosterish and unwilling to draw important distinctions. She writes beautifully about the love and care shown by friends who raise children together: friends who sit hospital vigils in the pediatric ICU; friends who teach one another not to settle for a partner who mistreats you; friends who help one another meet economic, emotional, and medical challenges that would daunt the strongest soul. If only Cohen had honored all this selfless love without denying the importance of biological ties.

Families, for Cohen, are defined solely by the function the adults perform, and not by the “form” of the relationship. She notes that even the liberal Barack Obama talks about “the difficulty he faced growing up without a father in the house,” but she’s remarkably incurious about why—what emotional chord the relationship with one’s father touches in so many hearts. “[B]iology isn’t necessary for kinship,” Cohen correctly argues—noting that cultures across world history would agree. But we harm children (and men) when we argue that biological fatherhood need not create paternal responsibilities. Expanding the sphere of kinship to sworn brothers or devoted friends is not the same as subtracting kin by denying the importance of a child’s father. Part of why forms exist is to summon people to perform functions—responsibilities—they might otherwise not choose, supporting those functions and expecting or even requiring them.

And while the reconfigured families she portrays are clearly havens for children who need as much love and care as they can get, Cohen is also incurious about whether the parental bond formed by friendship is (even) less stable than that forged by marriage. She does ask the question of what happens if a friend enters a romantic relationship and wants to move, but answers with a Pollyannaish, “Well, in this case one friend did start a new relationship but they all still live together!” This optimism sits oddly with the stories she tells elsewhere, in which moving away does disrupt even very close friendships, and new romantic partnerships often “eclips[e]” “once-devoted friendship.”

Some of the older rituals of friendship addressed these questions of exclusivity and moving away. Alan Bray’s The Friend, a study of vowed or devoted friendship in England, found that men who engaged in the publicly-committed form of friendship known as “wedded brotherhood” had only one such friend, as David had plenty of wives but only one Jonathan. English vows of friendship often included the pledge to share a common household. In the Book of Ruth, Ruth’s promise to share her life with her mother-in-law Naomi is provoked by Naomi’s decision to move, and begins, Where you go, I will go. Without such a pledge, friendship may not be fragile—there’s a special joy in reconnecting with a friend you haven’t seen in person in years—but it will be less reliable.

I wish Cohen had interviewed people for whom friendship-as-kinship, or friends-as-coparents, had proven painful—a failure, a mistake. That’s not because I disagree with her about the immense overlooked beauty of friendship. I agree with Cohen so much that I’m planning a covenant of kinship with the woman I love, based on the same traditions Bray outlines and likely using Ruth’s promises as our pledge. And so I know how much people who are called to an unrecognized form of love need guidance. We need the wisdom that comes from hard experience. In order to live devoted friendship well, we need to explore how it goes wrong.

For many of us, childhood friendships offer our first experience of the shock of love. While parents and siblings typically come into our lives as a given, friends are discovered. The poet Dunstan Thompson wrote, in lines likely inspired by his love for his partner,

Here I have found, as after thunder showers,

The friend my childhood promised me….

The Other Significant Others may be overconfident, relativist, a bit willful—but it’s also a promise that growing up doesn’t have to mean outgrowing one of the deepest forms of love there is.

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Now Playing

Bill Withers, “Lean on Me.”

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IDK, all I’ve been doing is launch stuff; this short interview with the Life on Side B podcast, focusing on gay journeys to integrity, might’ve gotten lost in the mix and may be especially interesting to those who cavort to the tune of the gaily dancing Dragon.

Two friends sharing a bike photographed by Carey Moutton, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.