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My Best Friend's Wedding Dress

At thirty, if someone had asked me to draw my life as it felt, I would have drawn a cracking landmass. A fine-liner cartoon like those used to break up the lists of facts in elementary geography textbooks; a simple rendering of fragmenting tectonic plates, each carrying a small cargo of people — pairs, mostly, with some single bodies, some infants, dogs familiar and strange.

In this drawing, my own plate looks solid enough; it affords a pleasant view of the surrounding domestic scenes. But it has broken away from the others, and a swift tide is dragging it further out. I’m on the edge, perhaps contemplating whether to jump in and swim across to another plate. I’m reluctant, though. If I jump, I risk losing my private foothold. I’m drifting, yes, but I feel as if I can steer this plate. And if not, I can lie down and stretch out unmolested. I call out to a neighbour: ‘What do you think I should do?’ She shrugs, and turns to tend to her family. She’s wearing a big fuck-off ring and a wedding veil, which trails across the bowl of mush she’s feeding to her baby.

One of the defining characteristics of conventional adulthood seems to be a fragmenting social world, a drift from friendship and school to coupledom and work. The official cultural markers of adulthood— the careers and marriages and children and houses — all conspire to hasten this drift. Perhaps my inability to connect to adulthood derives, at least in part, from reluctance to let go of old, fierce friendships, despite the possibility they are already small oceans away.

At sixteen, Annie and I had a Ghost World kind of friendship. We viewed life through the same pair of second-hand shades and gained our admittance with matching fake IDs. Our personal value system was comprehensive, and complex. We had a formal line on everything from the aesthetic to the political. The finer points — vegetarianism, glitter, hottest rock stars, dumbest adults — were debated minutely on either of our balconies, set at bookends on a long street in a small inner-city Sydney suburb.

Between afternoons spent playing Iggy Pop down the phone line and evenings fuelled by illegally procured booze, we liked to make plans for the future. It was clear to both of us that once the tyranny of high school was over, we would live a life of uninhibited adventure. First we would travel, and party mightily. After a few years of that, we would probably want to settle down and have a family. Before we got too old and decrepit. Like, around twenty-three. This all sounds fairly conventional for middle-class girls, but we were not thinking of two separate families — we would start one together.

Annie, who was more interested in the experience of childbirth, would get pregnant via a sperm source still to be determined. We would raise that infant and any subsequent sprogs together. We would live together, bringing up baby in an inner-city house of our own, finally collapsing those pesky residential blocks that had kept us apart as we slept in our teenage beds. Our adult home would be large enough to allow us separate rooms, where we could entertain lovers as we saw fit. We weren’t lesbians — much to the chagrin of Annie’s lesbian mother, who listened to our plans with barely contained glee. No, we assured her, we would be free to embark on hetero dalliances, and could even leave the family for short trysts, bursts of travel and adventure. Isn’t the inability to ensure these private adventures the reason so many marriages fail? This arrangement would spare us from the seemingly inexhaustible loneliness we identified as a defining feature of motherhood. It would also spare us the horror of divorce because, as everyone knows, you can’t divorce your best friend.

‘It just makes sense,’ we told each other. ‘Build a life with someone you love, but don’t love-love.’

Love-love just complicates things. We would be savvy enough to keep that separate.

Were we serious about all this? Sometimes it felt that way. We talked about our plan so often and in so much detail. But surely we knew, even then, that this is not how our lives would go? Or did we actually think we could invent wholly new kinds of lives — and if so, when did that belief change?

While the first part of our itinerary (the travel and the parties) was easily accomplished, we soon discovered that the very tyranny we so longed to escape was part of what held us together. At school we were sisters in arms, but after graduation we were a less united front. If the plan was real, I was first to break away from it. As months turned to years, I began to realise that the space between late teens and early twenties was not so unfathomable, and my enthusiasm for having a baby at twenty-three in a non-sexual bestie union diminished. Annie, too, had other ideas. Within a year of high school, she started going on about university and employment, two social institutions in direct discordance with our already defined and inflexible code of conduct. At twenty-three, rather than being shacked up, we found ourselves at opposite ends of the country, at opposite ends of a scale of ambition, and at opposite ends of a shattered value system in a limiting adult world.

As children of the late 1980s and the 1990s, Annie and I were raised on a diet of friendship-first pop culture. In primary school, the pre-teen band of the minute was Girlfriend — also the name of the highest-selling pre-teen magazine in the country, which regularly featured the group. On television, the most-watched show was Seinfeld, about a bunch of thirtyish friends who spent their time together discussing their jobs, social lives, and romantic entanglements. Then it was Friends: same deal. The Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’, a pop song about girl power and friendship forever, became the best-selling single of 1996. Too cool for serious fandom, Annie and I sang along to it ironically with our small teen girl gang.

In our final years of high school, as the 1990s inched cringingly towards the millennium, we spent every Tuesday night at Bella’s house watching Dawson’s Creek. We were just a cute, close-knit crew of teenage besties, doing bong hits and drinking green cordial, watching a show about a (slightly cuter) close-knit crew of teenage besties. Like Jen, we were angsty and sexually active. Like Joey, we had dreams of notoriety and romantic adventure, and like Pacey, we did not know what the future held but hoped we would be together for all of it.

Around the same time, the urtext for friendship — and what is now one of the most popular television shows of all time — was Sex and the City, chronicling a gang of thirty-something besties and their successful lives in New York City. While each half-hour was ostensibly about the women’s sexual escapades with men — many of them deviants or pathetic caricatures, such as Mr Pussy and The Turtle, Mr Cocky and The Bone — the program’s main arc was friendship. The show celebrated the ways these women supported one another, reducing the world to an absurd comedy that could be digested over brunch. Friendship made their glamorous and footloose lives possible. Without friendship, they were the lonely, piteous outsiders, spinsters past their prime. Samantha, the brazen slut of the group, was adamant on the priority of friendship over romance: ‘We made a deal ages ago. Men, babies, it doesn’t matter. We’re soulmates.’

I resisted the show when I first saw it. It seemed too yuppy, too repressed. But in my mid-twenties, in the midst of a relationship breakdown, I housesat at Olivia’s place in Tasmania and spent the first two weeks binge watching, freezing in her lounge room, with Cassady pulled up close. When I finally finished those 47 NYC hours, I looked out at the grey sky of Hobart, thought about how alone I was, and went right back to episode one. It’s not so easy, in real life, to put friendship first.

Years later, as our twenties drew to a close, I put a season of Girls onto a hard drive for Annie to take with her to her new job in Fiji. I wished we could have watched it together. The show sketches a metacritique of friendship as a pop-cultural production. The characters are full of angst. Their lives are confusing. They want to lean back for at least ten seasons (plus re-runs) into friendship that is frozen, like Monica and Rachel’s. But how can they, after the social bonds of high school and college have dissipated? I sympathised with the uptight and controlling Marnie when she cajoled the whole gang out to the seaside so they could ‘heal’ their friendship and ‘prove to everyone via Instagram that we can still have fun as a group’. Marnie is awful. In that episode, she embodies some of the millennial tendencies I too possess. You can imagine her consulting internet listicles on ‘55 Ways to Have an Unforgettable Weekend Away with the Girls’ before packing her picnic hamper and designing her floral arrangements. The pathos lies in the fact that, while any of these girls might be able to marry, get a job, or one day put a deposit on a condo, they cannot lock down something as dynamic as friendship.

Throughout our twenties, Annie and I tried, at different points, to resurrect the friendship in its adolescent intensity. We did live together for a time, but found that ‘entertaining men’ in our rooms complicated the teenage utopia — men being, it turned out, subjects of their own, with all kinds of inconvenient needs and desires. It infuriated me that Dave, Annie’s boyfriend, could not simply be put back in the cupboard when she was finished playing with him. He was there every night, clad in some intolerable beanie, watching hard-hitting documentaries and strumming South American folk songs on his nylon-string guitar. He was there, ubiquitous — on the couch, in the kitchen, beside her on a milk crate in the backyard — a barricade against my attempts to commandeer her attention. And finally, not long after we moved in together, he was there, packing up the station wagon and moving her off to some new life that did not include me. And there they are still, together on a plate in the continental drift.

As we got older, our attempts at reclaiming teen-bestie fervour became less passionate. By the time we were nearing thirty, a shared home, or even a long road trip, seemed impossible. We settled instead for a nice cup of tea wedged between more pressing commitments. We moved in different circles, had different interests and different ways of conducting our lives. Annie, a community-development worker, had always been practical, civic-minded, family-oriented, intensely social. I remained creative, reactive, at odds with almost everything, and at my best socially one on one. It’s sad to look objectively at these two adults and remember that as children they thought they were the two halves of Aristophanes’ primal human. Sad in that bittersweet, midday-movie way. Sad in the way Ghost World is sad — because the slow collision of dreams with reality can leave us all feeling like the future owns us before we have even managed to make a scratch on it.

In 2012, six months before my thirtieth birthday, I received a giddy text message from Annie’s Fiji number. Darling. Sorry to do this via text — we’re on a beautiful island and can’t get phone credit . . . We just got engaged! It was amazing. Not a dry eye in the house.

I sent her an appropriate burst of emoji and congratulations and then put the phone down impassively. I felt devastatingly and permanently left out. Marriage was a plan for two, designed to draw a border around two bodies. Marriage added metaphoric oceans to the literal ones between us. I also felt guilty for not feeling unreservedly happy for her; I should craft a better reply. She probably couldn’t even get my emoji on her distant handset. I wandered around my quiet house, fretting. Made a cup of tea. Turned the heater up. Tried to ignore my teen memorabilia, still proudly on display: the photo-booth prints taken en route to our first music festival, the obnoxious dolphin paraphernalia we had exchanged for years. I tried to picture Annie in Fiji, over-freckled and glowing, draped in frangipani, dipped low to the sand in Dave’s exclusive embrace, backdropped by a red-hot sun sinking into some distant patch of the Pacific green as envy.

I tested the feeling of ‘breaking the news’ to Serge when he got home.

‘Annie and Dave got engaged!’ I said when he walked through the door, trying for enthusiasm.

‘Huh,’ said Serge, unsurprised. ‘And how do you feel about that?’

I squirmed. ‘I dunno. Happy, I guess.’

‘Great, then.’

I re-read the text message. A bulk send-out, I was sure. Annie can never resist the urge to crack a sarcastic joke, so ‘darling’ probably indicated a group address. Practical and funny; I both loved and hated her for it.

It wasn’t a slight on me that I was among many to receive the text — of course it wasn’t — but in my specific displacement from the performance of Annie’s future, I realised that, even though I no longer imagined us raising a family as husbandless co-wives, I hadn’t really believed in another plan since. I could see plenty of futures I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be stifled and contained in my relationship. I didn’t want a partnership that was static, frozen in time. I didn’t want to take on more than my share of the domestic or care-giving responsibilities. I didn’t want to assimilate into a milieu of ‘the suburban married’, if such a thing still existed, and if they would even have me. I didn’t want to make a declaration that aligned me with principles to which I did not subscribe. But what did I want? I was jealous that Annie was mapping out a future and I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, form my own. Annie was announcing her adult status, and I still felt like a teenager rising against the grown-up world.

‘I still feel like a teenager,’ I confessed to Serge later, interrupting a Battlestar Galactica marathon.

‘Me too, darlin’,’ he said, his lovely voice resonating with cool melancholy.

As the details of Dave’s proposal rippled out across the ocean via Facebook and rumour, I both loved and hated him as well. It was just too perfect — the element of surprise, the public display of high romance, weeping strangers, and sparkling wine. Later still, there were images of beaming individuals holding placards reading ‘Congratulations’ and ‘Dave loves Annie’ against a too-blue sky.

Their wedding was to be ‘a festival of love’, Dave told me upon their return. ‘Obviously we don’t have to get married,’ he said. ‘So we want it to be a celebration of us, of who we are and what we love.’

A festival of happiness where you are the headlining act: it’s a seductive and very millennial idea.

When Annie got back to Melbourne, we came to the topic only after our exhaustive complaints and triumphs, recounting all the fascinating and grotesque moments that had passed since last we met. Even then, Annie spoke of her wedding only lightly, giving scant details. As months passed, I waited in vain for her to give me a job. One that made me an important part of the event. But her lips were sealed against terms like bridesmaid and maid of honour. Instead, her favourite routine was a hammed-up ignorance of tradition.

‘Did you know the guy doesn’t even get an engagement ring?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Everyone knows that.’

Maybe Annie was trying to distance herself from the auspiciousness of the thing for my benefit, or perhaps she wanted to preserve her privacy. Either way, I came home sulky after our catch-ups. I re-watched Bridesmaids, feeling too much empathy for Kristen Wiig’s character. I was just as ridiculous. Just as desperate to have my relationship with the bride acknowledged. Just as left out. I suffered the inability to move forward into the next stage of life. Mishka sat anxiously on my feet and yodelled in the scene with the puppies. Soon she would be gone, too; everything in my life was temporary. I yearned for a jubilant synchronised-dance conclusion.

When Annie finally asked me to help her, I felt like I was being proposed to. Did I want to come with her to buy a wedding dress? I do! But it was not long before the reality of the task was brought home. Annie hates shopping. A request for help to buy a dress was like a request that someone you trust be in your firing squad. What started as flicking through trashy magazines and emailing photos of 1940s Hollywood starlets quickly turned into another point on which to emphasise our difference. I was Annie’s ‘shopping friend’. I was the only woman she knew who was not too busy — I don’t know, say, with practising human-rights law or directing theatre for the disabled — to cultivate skills in the consumerist arts. We sacrificed our paltry catch-ups to stressful marches through the arcades of Melbourne.

I asked Annie what kind of dress shape she preferred, and she traced her figure in a slick, hugging hourglass shape.

‘A wiggle dress?’

‘Oh, Doyle, trust you to know that.’

Everyone knows that, don’t they? At least anyone who has ever attempted to buy a cut-price frock online.

At home, I anxiously mimicked Annie’s hand movements for Serge. ‘Let’s play the what-kind-of-dress-is-this game.’

He looked at me, bemused and patient. ‘A wiggle dress?’

I drew a few more, just to check. He correctly guessed A-line and baby doll before sighing, pushing his glasses back up his crumpled nose. This, I knew, was my cue to quit.

‘It’s common knowledge though, right? I’m not some kind of shallow clotheshorse?’

‘You may not be, but I am. I’ll be wearing a gold suit to my wedding.’ He drew a sharp collar in the air. ‘Texan cut.’

Annie didn’t want to go to a bridal boutique, so we restricted ourselves to department stores and less formal dress shops. We tried on dresses that were too casual, too slutty, too cheap, too plain, too thin, too thick, too weird, too structured. We tried on blue dresses and spotted dresses and crepe dresses and dresses with impertinent bows. She looked at me suspiciously when I suggested that trying on clothes can be fun, that for some, the dress, the hair, the shoes, and the matching accessories is the main pull towards the wedding event. She shuddered.

‘Why are you doing this again?’ I asked.

‘It will be nice to have a party.’

She pulled a giant Grecian urn of a dress over her shoulders and posed awkwardly beneath the department-store fluoros.

‘Not quite right,’ she said, ripping it off and attempting to hang it up again by its labyrinthine straps. ‘It needs to be more . . .’

‘Bridal?’

She gave me a look.

I proffered a silver dress, ruffled and sequined, like a swan at a disco.

‘I think that’s too . . .’

‘Birdal?’

We were a week out from wedding day when I managed to drag Annie through the doors of the specialty boutique. ‘At this point, we have nothing to lose,’ I coaxed.

I could feel her body tensing. If we were cartoons, her toes would be excavating the concrete. There would be sparks at her heels.

In the boutique, brides and bridesmaids tittered and sparkled in floor-length gowns. These were dresses charged with making announcements. ‘Look, a beautiful woman succeeding at life!’ they screamed, in appropriate languages for their various contexts.

A heavily made-up woman wearing an unseasonable fascinator smiled broadly at us. ‘When’s the special day?’

We cowered. We’d been shamed by shop assistants all over Melbourne. In the boutique, however, they had special training for this kind of thing.

‘You’re like me,’ replied the woman, when Annie mumbled the date. ‘Keep it casual! It’s all about having fun!’

She bundled Annie into the change room and began to launch dresses at her like a talented prosecutor might pose questions.

‘There,’ said the assistant. ‘That’s gorgeous, but it’s also fun. Just like you.’

Beautiful seventeen-year-old girls in $500 debutante frocks paraded along the mirrored promenade between the change rooms. The store buzzed with nervous glamour, which is what glamour is: nerves pulled and prodded, insecurity and desire sewn into impractical dresses, bodies bleached and highlighted, plucked and pouted, and sent out into the world. Tottering. Unstable. Glamour is so fragile it will only hold together for a day, an hour. It’s strange that we mark a lifetime’s commitment with this brief magic.

Annie joined the glamour parade. She tottered. She grimaced in the mirror. She wrangled straps and boobs. She would not, could not, enjoy the spectacle she was making of herself and her life. Maybe I was cruel to ignore her discomfort. I flicked through a rack of black glomesh.

‘What’s the occasion?’ the women asked me, in their cash-draw singsong.

‘Jealousy,’ I said, pulling a flashy gown over my body and staring into a mirror as if it were another world.

I know a few divorcees under thirty-five now. These are women who had weddings in their early twenties but never felt completely comfortable in their marriage. In almost every case, they got married because that’s what their best friends were doing. The desire to stay together was stronger than the desire to work out what made them distinct.

In Japan, there is a rising trend for women to have solo weddings. These solo brides are reclaiming a term, ‘himono onna’, which translates literally as ‘dried-fish woman’. I read about them in a Marie Claire.

‘I was brought up to believe that I could take care of myself, so marriage has never been a priority for me; getting married does not equal being happy,’ thirty-seven-year-old Akiki told the magazine. She went on to describe a whole crew of thirty-something femme babes who hold the same opinions. This doesn’t mean that they should miss out on the event. A wedding, the women suggested, is about more than the beginning of a marriage. It is a milestone in maturity. It announces adulthood. The himono onna do not want the burden of men, but they still want to make this statement.

In Japan, a solo wedding package includes the dress, professional makeup and photographs, and dinner in a glamorous restaurant, alone or with a paid escort. And a week or so later, a photo album to place strategically on the coffee table. It’s something to be proud of, to mark an arrival, if not a conventional path to get there.

What else does a solo wedding prove? It’s a niche product that has arisen from consumer need. Designed as a substitute for marriage, it also highlights what this institution has become: a dress, a photograph, a printed announcement. A fetishised commodity in any well-constructed adult life. But if there is commercialism here, there is feminism, too. It takes a strong will and a pragmatic mind to ignore the stigma attached to a move like this. Dried-fish wife. Would I be bold enough to make this statement? I could still hear, in my inner ear, the schoolyard taunt you love yourself, go marry yourself. It was a lonely-making taunt.

‘I don’t feel lonely at the moment,’ said one of the solo brides. ‘But I would be in trouble if my best friend was to get married.’

I left the dress on for a few extra turns.

When Annie went back into the change room, I was tempted to run. Out of the shop, across the rows of stalling traffic, the hectares of city, of offices, commerce, and bars, and on and on, in this heavy dress, straight into the blazing sun.

The change-room door opened, and Annie stood in the stall. She looked tall and gorgeous and utterly grown up. A woman in her wedding dress in a room full of kids playing dress-up.

‘Is this it?’ I felt my throat catch.

‘I think it is,’ she said.

We stood together, grinning in the room of mirrors. It was a classic lock-down shot lifted straight from a rom-com, with life continuing, uncontainable, beyond the frame. We waited, perfectly in character, for a director to yell cut.

There is a scene in the 1978 film Girlfriends in which the eponymous BFFs fight. Susan, depressed and disillusioned, takes the train from the city to her best friend Anne’s (the name is pure coincidence) new adult abode. It’s the first time we see this house. For most of the film the girls live together in a cramped apartment, writing poetry and taking photographs of each other sleeping. They tango through shabby rooms, taking their dual future for granted, until it vanishes, suddenly and irretrievably, into the adult world of marriage and careers. Initially, they try to make the best of it. At Anne’s new big-girl house, she gives Susan a present she has brought back from her honeymoon: a hideous kaftan. There is a slideshow of their trip, too — photos of ruins, which the new husband (a suitably bearded academic who indeed looks like he belongs in front of a 1970s chalkboard) enjoys explaining. The visit does not end well.

‘Even if we want different things, I’m still the same person,’ Anne insists finally, exasperated.

‘No, you’re not! You’re married,’ yells Susan.

A married best friend is different because her needs are different. A married best friend is different because the way she accesses the world has changed. A marriage, when you strip it down and stand it in front of the mirror, is a legally recognised relationship in a way that friendships can never be. Even if friends are as important to you. Even if you are working hard, tirelessly, to keep friendship at the centre of your life.

After Cassady died, I had been angry. I felt alone in my grief, and I couldn’t work out why. Dogs were not the centre of most people’s lives, I knew that; but surely the people close to me would understand how vital Cassady was to me? I wanted flowers, soup, and stroked hair. Instead, I had an irreducible pit in my stomach and an aching sense of sadness.

I railed against this feeling in my psychologist’s tastefully furnished office. I blamed Serge first. Why wasn’t he there for me as much as I needed him?

She reminded me that although in an ideal world the people in our lives tend to our needs, in reality it is unfair to demand more from someone than they can give. Serge, who bore the brunt of my sorrow, was stressed at work; he could be more sympathetic, sure, but he had also made it clear he had enough on his plate. ‘He’s told you what he can provide. Now you need to decide whether that’s acceptable,’ she said.

‘What about everyone else, though?’ I demanded, shifting the conversation away from this uncomfortable reality.

‘Well, do they know what you need?’ she asked.

I couldn’t answer. My friendships had come to seem so ethereal and fragile that I seldom dared to make demands within them. Besides, wasn’t friendship supposed to be fun? On television, friendship is a place to play hooky from those other, more staid parts of life. One of our culture’s favourite adult fantasies is unending friendship, goofing around without responsibility or consequence. In my past, I had been guilty of excusing myself from friendships that became too difficult, too messy and demanding. I didn’t want to be a similar burden. In an adult world, a friendship that causes problems, that is not consistently enjoyable, is surely a toxic asset. Who has time for such a thing?

At home, I searched the internet for advice. In New York magazine, Ada Calhoun extolled the secret to friendships in your thirties. You have to ‘lower the bar’, she writes. ‘There is no friend equivalent of the candlelit dinner and rose-strewn canopy bed. To stay friends is to make do with the social equivalent of a taco truck and bathroom quickie.’

The article, which describes once inseparable besties catching up during mutually essential trips to the pharmacy, or while walking each other to meetings, depicts a very specific kind of existence. These are adults with fancy jobs, children, and partners, trying to be everything to everyone, and feeling relieved when a friend cancels drinks. Friendship, in Calhoun’s view, is an important part of successful adult life. Time with friends is like going to the gym or having a cold-pressed juice — something you should fit into a busy day because it’s good for your health and wellbeing.

This didn’t help me, though, not really. How could you discuss grief at the taco truck and the toilet stalls? How could you yell and scream about jealousy at the pharmacy?

Calhoun’s description of adult pals is antithetical to the reputation friendship — particularly female friendship — has for being fraught and conflict-ridden. And yet is the lack of time afforded to these kinds of relationships part of the reason they are deemed volatile in the first place? Like Calhoun, I’ve had friendships as passionate as love affairs, but I have never fought with a friend in the entitled, unrestrained way I would with my partner.

When I eventually decided to speak to Annie about how I’d been feeling, I prepared an elaborate picnic. I made a flan. I made two types of salad and a sweet treat. I was terrified. To say ‘my needs are not being met’ in a friendship in your thirties felt wrong on every level — unendurably selfish. I wanted the picnic to keep things light, to maintain the element of fun that would make the difficult afternoon worthwhile. We ate two courses in the dappled sun before I worked up the guts to get serious. I tried to be articulate, but as emotions built up, I descended into a teenage vocabulary.

‘I drop everything for you!’ I whined. ‘You don’t care about me!’

‘You seemed so angry that I figured it was better to leave you alone,’ Annie said through tears.

A month later, she came to my house with a potted lemon tree that I have named Clementine but have no idea how to take care of. Adult friendship is hard. Ours is not volatile so much as castaway, adrift in uncharted waters.

In 2016, three years after Calhoun’s article, New York magazine ran a very different perspective. ‘When friendships are your primary relationships,’ wrote Briallen Hopper, ‘friendship isn’t just important: it’s existential.’

This has been true before. In other times, when marriage was more ubiquitous, though less emotionally central, friendship was the primary emotional relationship for many — men as well as women. While Hopper laments that her ‘most important relationships are chronically underrated and legally nonexistent’, at other points in history it was precisely this that sanctified them. In Ancient Greece and Rome, friendship was an ideal to which to aspire. For Erasmus and Aristotle, an ideal friendship was creative, inspiring, even transcendent. For Cicero, friendship was two bodies sharing a soul, a perfect union without the debasement of sex or the mess of children. During the Renaissance, strong friendships were akin to marriage. A friendship could be a covenant. Men were buried together. They bequeathed one another their fortunes — to the chagrin, no doubt, of many wives left in situations far less than ideal.

Women had intense friendships, too, even if their virtues were less extolled upon. Nevertheless, historians of the early modern period have mistaken ardent and pseudonymous letters written by women for the correspondence of married couples. In the seventeenth century, the poet Katherine Philips insisted that as the soul has no sex, female friendship could be of no lower order than men’s. To prove this, she formed an official coterie and dubbed it the ‘Society of Friendship’. To the society, friendship was about support, sharing political views and secrets, and writing poems about all of the above. In her poem ‘Friendship’s Mystery, to my Dearest Lucasia’, she writes that friendship makes ‘Both Princes, and both Subjects too’ — no insignificant claim for a royalist. For Philips, friendships were a place of becoming; like writing, they were both an imperative and an active process. ‘Poets and friends are born what they are,’ she writes in ‘A Friend’. In the Victorian era, women wore jewellery made from one another’s hair. It was not unheard of for small groups of middle-class married women to move to the country together and live apart from their husbands, enjoying female company away from any force that might deem it imprudent or perverse. They were schooled and punished, of course, though mainly in literature.

Marriage, suicide, or madness was the fate of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fictional female, and it’s a tradition we have continued into the twenty-first century. While real women have complex, challenging, and important relationships, the women of literature and popular culture are usually doomed or tamed. It is an enduring trope that friendship — particularly the exclusive, overly intimate type explored in films such as Girlfriends or Frances Ha — is something to grow out of. Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet comes to her senses about marriage. Carrie and Big must have a wedding. Thelma and Louise drive off that cliff because there is no place for them in the world they come from. It’s not just that we can’t make space for this kind of friendship in social reality — we can’t even imagine how it would work.

This tradition haunted me recently as I let everything in my life fall away to finish Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. In her quartet, Ferrante eschews the marriage plots of the nineteenth century and the modern romantic comedy to present a more complex plot centred on friendship. The twinned protagonists of these novels are locked in a relationship constantly agitated by the pressures, violence, and repression that women faced in mid-century Naples. In many stages of the narrative, the reader is given to wonder what would have been possible if these two women’s lives could have been lived together in a formally acknowledged partnership, like the friendship ideals of the ancients, or the marriage contracts that reify heterosexual marriage — if the pressures of patriarchal capitalism didn’t conspire to keep them at opposite ends of a dyad. Writing in n+1, Dayna Tortorici notes how readers and critics, ‘in absence of adequate vocabulary’, call Lila and Lenù’s bond ‘“female friendship” — an ambiguous catchall that’s slightly evocative of a slumber party’. This phrase might be enough for shows such as Sex and the City, which figure friendship as a commodity, but it’s insufficient in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and in our own lives, where our connections to people mark us in indescribable ways.

This sense of an inadequate vocabulary that shadows much of Western literature also curtails my own attempt to describe my friendships without resorting to cliché or to tropes of juvenile covenants and adult loss. How do I express longing for friendship without falling into nostalgia? How do I celebrate and insist on an ideal without romanticising real relationships? Maturity, in some sense, has to be about finding ways to make complex interactions work, not transmogrifying anything difficult into a misty glade of romance.

I’m aware of the danger, in discussing friendships, of erasing queerness. Where does the undermining of same-sex friendship end and fear of homosexuality begin? Were those Victorian women in fact lesbians retreating from a culture that hated them? In one scene in the Neapolitan novels, a grown-up Lenù catches her toddler playing erotic games with Lila’s. She’s shocked at first, and then, feeling something else entirely, something more like recognition, she strains to remember if she and Lila had ever played such games, experienced some kind of erotic becoming, a transgressive love that was blocked as they came into competition with each other, racing to realise adult fantasies. And yet, aware of the risk, I think there is something in friendship that is seditious, a threat to heteronormativity that is distinct from non-heterosexual relationships. There is no way to know what kinds of lives would be possible or would flourish outside the social reality we in Western cultures know, but I think that ‘female’ friendships (it is the friendship that is female, not the friends per se), which have no institutional name or legal premise, are figured, rightly, in Ferrante’s texts as acts of resistance. They are places from which we could organise different kinds of adult lives, if only we had the opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, though, despite our friendship-first popular culture, we often have less, not more, time and space for friendship than we did one hundred years ago.

Annie and I drift along side by side, occasionally braving the current between our two patches of earth. I have faith that we will keep hold of each other, and that the inevitable drifts will be temporary. But if I want my adult life to have friendship at its centre, how else might I go about this? Casual work makes it hard to forge lasting friendships at work. Renting in a seller’s market means I’ve moved too often to befriend my neighbours, who are similarly changeable. For most, family pressures, the second shift at home after work, and council ordinances that fragment communities and subcultures in service of development all stand between us.

It is no longer unusual, in cities like mine, for people to go it alone. We are living alone. Our bank accounts have one name on them. We are raising children alone, taking holidays alone, eating alone. Alone, alone, alone. I love being alone, except when I don’t — when I’m logging on to Facebook, clicking for a fix, throwing ropes between those shifting plates and thinking, Well, it’s not enough. Perhaps we do only have time for marriage or friendship, and this is the price we pay for sexual relationships that are also loving and supportive, rather than mere economic and procreative pacts. Or worse, perhaps the pressure to construct recognisably ‘adult’ lives, with monogamous partners, houses, children, careers, and retirement plans works also to exclude those who have, or want, different kinds of primary relationships.

This thought got Mickey Rourke started in my inner ear again. To distract myself, I headed back to the long document of fragments that was becoming this book. The what-the-fuck-am-I-doing book, which was a too-long draft lacking structure and resolve.

‘So what is the book about?’ my psychologist asked, when I told her how I was spending my time. I dreaded this question — the manuscript was too nebulous, and so was the topic. I felt sheepish and glib when I tried to describe it to someone.

‘It’s about adulthood,’ I said, as though that explained everything, hoping she would leave it there.

‘What about adulthood?’

Once again I considered running out into the street. But if ever there’s a place to get your thoughts in order, your psychologist’s office must be it.

‘About how these milestones we have are outmoded and actually kinda oppressive in the present moment. You know, the idea that you would have a career, kids, a house, and this is how you measure your maturity. It’s about trying to think about adulthood in a different way, to become comfortable with and maybe even excited by maturity.’

To my relief, she nodded her head knowingly. ‘I see people about this problem all the time. Mostly twenty-nine-year-olds coming up to their thirtieth birthday and losing it. One guy was ready to kill himself because he felt so worthless,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘His therapy was all about defining the areas of his development that were actually very advanced. He was such a caring person, for instance. He might have been, in another time, a real cornerstone of a community. But now he’s just kind. He helps everyone around him, but he doesn’t get any kind of validation for that. Instead, he feels inferior and depressed for want of a career or a house. That’s what middle-class Australia thinks you should have to be a real person.’

‘Yes, exactly!’

She drew a diagram on the back of my folder. ‘I call this the Hong Kong skyline,’ she said. ‘Some buildings are tall, well-developed: “career”, say, or “relationships”, and others are smaller, like “community” or “financial freedom”. But there are things to develop that we really don’t talk about much, like “kindness”.’

I nodded, but I only half-read the diagram because the phrase ‘Hong Kong skyline’ was far more evocative than the developmental schema she used it to draw. In my science-fiction novel, the roofs of the skyscrapers in future Hong Kong were so covered in water collectors and solar panels that passengers in aircraft lowered their shutters so as not to go blind.

‘Another exercise I do with them comes from existential psychology. In it, you ask the patient to imagine their funeral. They are a spirit flying around the funeral home and they can see who is there, and eavesdrop on the various conversations mourners are having while they drink their tea. I ask them, who’s there, and what are they saying about you?’

‘What you think they are saying, or what you hope they’d say?’

‘You do both — one where you die tomorrow, and one ideal funeral, at the end of a long life.’

‘Sounds depressing.’

‘No, it’s a very good kick in the pants!’ she said. ‘Particularly for people who are quite materialistic, or always striving for status. Hardly anyone wants their friends to say things like “She had very nice furniture,” or “She quickly ascended the corporate ladder,” at their funeral. This is when something like kindness becomes an important thing to have developed.’

Conspicuously, she did not suggest that we do the funeral exercise. But on my way home I began to formulate it. I flew in through the skylight of the funeral home, where my friends and family were about to sit down to a supper including actual pieces of my body. This will be in my will. It’s something I’ve wanted since I was a kid.

‘Gross,’ Annie has said, repeatedly, when I’ve outlined the menu for my wake. ‘No one will want to do that.’

‘Not like a whole steak, though — just very fine slices, perhaps lightly tossed in a salad. Then you will be digested by the people that you love, and you will actually be an energy source for them. It’s a basic gesture of kindness to feed your friends.’

Annie has steadfastly been refusing to eat me for twenty years, but I know that when it comes down to it, she will.

In any case, I acknowledge that it will be a challenging meal. And there I am, the spirit person, flying around and eavesdropping while people complain about the food and joke about what a weirdo I was. A difficult person, perhaps. A person who loved dogs and the ocean, and was a pain in the arse to argue with. But also maybe they’d say I was fun, or generous, or maybe, if I’m really lucky, inspiring. I’d fly back out of the funeral home, past the staff taking a smoko and laughing about what freakish requests people who pre-pay their funerals make, and then back over the town and maybe even further — a quick round-the-world joyride — being very careful to shut my eyes tightly as I fly over the Hong Kong skyline, so I don’t get blinded by all the shit that obsessed me while I was alive.