I love asking close friends how they met. In our romantic relationships, the practice of sharing the stories of our firsts—first texts, first dates, first dances, first anniversaries—loudly, proudly, and publicly isn’t just encouraged but frequently expected. However, when it comes to friendship, these memories are often left untold, sitting silent in our chests, recounted only in the occasional birthday speech or wedding toast. Beyond these rare moments, when we’re granted permission to speak, we ignore our friendship love stories—even when they prove themselves to be more long-lasting and life-affirming than the relationships we have with the people we date or even marry.
Nerida Ross and Maddison Costello met in college while taking the same art history course. At the time, Nerida referred to Maddi as her “theater friend” after they fell into a habit of going to see shows together—something none of their other friends ever wanted to do. As they neared the end of their studies, they each shared that they’d been wanting to go overseas on one last big trip before starting full-time work. They decided to do it together. “I remember saying to one of my high school best friends, ‘I barely know this person—we’re just theater friends and we’re about to go on a three-month trip together,’” Nerida tells me.
Any concerns were soon put to rest as they explored Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba. While traveling, Maddi lost her phone, then Nerida lost her passport and wallet. By the end of the trip, they were joking that they’d become two halves of one whole. With Maddi unable to contact anyone and Nerida without any money, they shared one phone and one credit card for the remainder of their trip. “We were in hostels telling people we were one whole now and everyone was like: You guys are finding this way funnier than you should be,” remembers Nerida.
When they returned home, Maddi and Nerida became inseparable. They started DJing together at least twice a week and became a kind of package deal in their personal lives too—if one was invited somewhere, the other was, too. In the years that followed, it wasn’t uncommon for them to arrive at a friend’s dinner party and be the only non-romantic couple invited. When they started DJing weddings, weekends involved long drives and conversations—many about the strangers’ weddings they’d just attended. Both working in production, Maddi and Nerida have always had a lot of opinions about event spaces, lighting, speeches, music, and catering. And most of the time, their opinions were the same. If they were ever to throw a wedding, they both agreed it would be epic.
When I ask Maddi and Nerida when they decided to throw their friend wedding, affectionately known as their “uncivil ceremony,” they tell me they have different versions of how it came to be. For Maddi, it was those hundred little conversations about weddings that led them to the idea that if they hosted one, it would be perfect. For Nerida, the moment is more specific.
After losing her dad, Nerida would often find herself crying behind the DJ booth during wedding speeches, even when she didn’t know the couple who were getting married. One night, following a particularly beautiful wedding of a mutual friend, Nerida tells me she went back to the accommodation she was sharing with Maddi and broke down. “I was telling her that I was just so sad, because my dad will never be at a wedding that I have,” says Nerida. “I told her that, no matter what—if I get married to anybody—it will be a sad day, no matter how perfect it is. And she just said to me, ‘Don’t worry, we can have a wedding and it will be the best.’”
The uncivil ceremony, which was somewhere between a joke and an earnest celebration of their friendship, was held to coincide with Nerida’s and Maddi’s thirtieth birthdays. Together, they planned a party of epic proportions, inviting 150 family and friends to Nerida’s mom’s house, where they’d laid checkered flooring, built a stage, and arranged for a friend’s seven-piece band to play. When planning the party, both Maddi and Nerida agreed they wanted their wedding to feel heartwarming but also be quite funny. They decided the theme of the party would be “wedding” so that everyone could dress as a bride, bridesmaid, or wear a suit if they wanted to. “It was really fun and subconsciously took a little bit of the focus off us,” Maddi tells me.
Nerida wore a navy-blue suit with embroidered flames on the sleeves, while Maddi wore a strapless black dress with opera gloves, each adorned with a giant baby-blue bow. While there wasn’t a ceremony per se, there were speeches and a cake. As a surprise, Nerida asked her friends in the band to write a song for Maddi, which was played early in the night.
Falling in line with their birthdays, the wedding also happened just weeks before Nerida moved from Australia to Canada. “With the timing, particularly for me, it actually really felt like a public commitment,” Maddi tells me. “It was like, even though we’re not going to be in the same place, I am saying to myself and to everyone here that this is a really important relationship that I’m going to work on and keep in my life. It was nice to be able to do that.”
But for all the joy of the wedding, it came along with its own unique anxieties too. When they first started planning the event, both Nerida’s and Maddi’s mothers expressed how uncomfortable they were with the concept. Both progressive, feminist women, their fear wasn’t that their daughters were making a commitment to each other in a romantic or queer sense—rather, it was that they seemed to be rejecting the idea of romance completely. The idea of their daughters marrying a friend, same-sex or not, wasn’t anywhere near as alarming as the idea that this could mean they wouldn’t marry anyone for real—for true love—in the future. “Our moms reacted really similarly,” Maddi tells me. “I remember mine saying, ‘But what if you meet someone one day and you actually want to get married to them? Do you think they might be confused that you had a wedding with Nerida?’ And I was like, ‘No, I think if I was going to marry someone, they would know me well enough to understand my relationship with her.’”
Despite more people choosing to reject the tradition of marriage, our romantic relationships are still at the center of modern life. Today, marriage is an automatic recognition of someone’s next of kin and a right hard-fought for by members of the queer community. But the more I speak to people about their friendships, the more my feelings about the romance, intimacy, and love that we can wrap our friends in are validated.
The idea that grand acts of commitment and adoration should be saved only for those with whom we’re in a sexual relationship seems more stifling the longer I think about, observe, and pay attention to the tenderness of my own friendships. While polyamory, ethical non-monogamy, and asexuality each challenge the bounds of platonic and romantic love, for the most part society still has rigid rules as to who is allowed to show love to whom.
It was surprising to learn that people didn’t always value romance above friendship. Just as the push toward the nuclear family was fueled by capitalism, at the expense of the village, the idea that our romantic relationships should be valued above all else is one that has been influenced by society’s changing values of work and community. In The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work,1 Eli J. Finkel writes about the historical shift of focus from pragmatism to love, which occurred within marriages after the Industrial Revolution. Before industrialization, people were often closest to their friends and considered marriage a relationship based on economics and security more than love and tender feelings.
“Industrialization set the stage for love’s triumph—ultimately producing the breadwinner-homemaker, love-based marriage immortalized in 1950s sitcoms—by radically altering America’s economy and social structure,” writes Finkel. As households became richer, more suburban, and more nuclear, people felt less concern about their basic needs of safety, food, and shelter. But with this comfort came a perceived lack of need for the people who once provided the love that marriages didn’t: close friends.
When society’s perceptions of romantic relationships shifted, the pendulum swung so far it completely knocked over the bonds people had built and nurtured with close friends, neighbors, and their community. According to Finkel, industrialization weakened our social ties. In the US, people moved to cities, where they were less likely to make friends with neighbors. As friendship became harder to access outside the home, people looked for everything they once got from their community from their partner. As our view of marriage changed, so did our perception of friendship and its importance.
If industrialization provided fertile ground for the narrative that romantic love is the answer, Romanticism is where the idea flourished. It was during the Romantic era that people began to place an emphasis on the importance of our emotions, imagination, and the wonders of love and nature. Romanticism arrived as an antidote to the struggles of an industrialized world, but through literature, art, and music, it also created many of the ideas that still sit firmly at the heart of modern beliefs. We expect love to conquer all because we invest so much in finding it. And to give romantic love the power and gravitas society has been so convinced it deserves, we’ve let our friendships wither by the wayside.
The hesitation to show affection to our closest friends is something Dr. Marisa G. Franco writes about in her book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends.2 “We are petrified to express love for our friends because if we do, we risk accusations of being attracted to them,” she writes. “But this muddling reveals our collective confusion as to different forms of love.”
Of course, what Dr. Franco is really touching on is how the influence of homophobia and heteronormativity on our friendships, particularly evident in the lack of a label for close male friends (boyfriends, unlike girlfriends, isn’t typically used to refer to platonic relationships), has created a hesitation to show physical affection to people we wouldn’t want to appear sexually attracted to. And while the acceptance of different sexualities and gender identities has made great progress in the last decades, who we feel we’re allowed to be close to is still affected by heteronormativity.
In Platonic, Dr. Franco references Angela Chen, the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex,3 who says there are three types of love—platonic, romantic, and sexual—which can overlap or be felt separately. Before marriage and romantic love became so intertwined, people were more likely to feel romantically about their friends, and show them types of nonsexual affection, like holding hands, which is now usually reserved for whoever we’re dating. “Romantic love in friendship isn’t radical,” writes Franco. “When we pretend romantic love is abnormal in friendship, we leave people ashamed and confused by the deep love they feel for friends. Then, instead of expressing this love, they bury it.”
When I speak to people about their closest friendships, love is the undercurrent of every conversation. The more we love our friends, the more they can frustrate, inspire, or disappoint us. The love we feel for our very best friends may be different from the love we feel for a partner, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less real or any less important. And when partners feel threatened by this love, it’s due to the misunderstanding that different kinds of love can coexist. So why is the love we have for these people consistently placed second to romantic love? Why do we focus so much on finding the one when there is so much love to be found and shown to our friends, who can reciprocate that love whether we’re single, in a relationship, or nursing a bruised heart? If all kinds of love—platonic, romantic, sexual—are equal, and can exist independent of one another or happily overlap, perhaps it’s time to reconsider how we balance the scales.
When I was in my early twenties, a year after breaking up with my first long-term boyfriend, I had a get-together with six of my closest friends to celebrate 365 days of being single. We gathered on a picnic blanket at an outdoor cinema, and I drank a tiny bottle of champagne (likely plucked from a freebie table at work) through a paper straw. A photo from that night is still on my Facebook page, posted with the painfully 2010s caption Celebrating life with these ones.
Though the theoretical purpose of that night was to celebrate a year of independence and a full recovery from heartbreak, looking back, it wasn’t really about my romantic life—or single status—at all. While I’m sure I thought I was being extremely cryptic at the time, my Facebook caption really did say it all. I was celebrating a year of unabashed, uncomplicated, and completely life-changing friendship. Today, more than a decade later, four of those six friends in that photo are still part of my closest circle—a fact which I wholly credit to those years we spent so tightly bound.
For single women, friendship can easily be prioritized above all else. And it’s magic.
In her 2016 book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation,4 Rebecca Traister argues that for women, single life is liberation. “Among the largely unacknowledged truths of female life is that women’s primary, foundational, formative relationships are as likely to be with each other as they are with the men we’ve been told since childhood are supposed to be the people who complete us,” she writes.
It’s Traister’s belief, much like that of Angela Chen, that there are many types of loving relationships, but none that should ever automatically be prioritized above another. After hundreds of interviews with single people, Traister hoped to question our definition of what counts as a “real” partnership. “Do two people have to have regular sexual contact and be driven by physical desire in order to rate as a couple? Must they bring each other regular mutual sexual satisfaction? Are they faithful to each other?” she writes. “By those measures, many heterosexual marriages wouldn’t qualify.”
Toward the end of my conversation with Nerida and Maddi, I’m asked if I’ve seen that episode of Sex and the City. The episode, of course, is “A Woman’s Right to Shoes,”5 in which main character, Carrie Bradshaw, has a pair of Manolo Blahniks stolen at a baby shower. After her friend Kyra, who hosted the party, refuses to pay Carrie the 485 dollars the shoes were worth, Carrie calculates that in their years of friendship she’s bought Kyra an engagement gift, a wedding gift, and three baby gifts, and she’s traveled out of state for her wedding. In total, Carrie works out that she’s spent more than 2,300 dollars celebrating Kyra’s choice to get married and have kids. It’s in this moment of frustration that Carrie realizes something so many single women I know relate to: There are no celebrations for explicitly single people. As Carrie puts it, “Hallmark doesn’t make a congratulations-you-didn’t-marry-the-wrong-guy card. And where’s the flatware for going on vacation alone?”
Friendships among single women have an intensity that’s both hard to describe and impossible to replicate. In a world where we’re constantly told that romantic love can—and should—conquer all, the times it’s easiest to give our friendships the attention they deserve often comes when we’re not in a romantic relationship. When we’re single, the space that could be occupied by a lover is free to be filled up by friends—not just by one, but many. With more room to evolve and become more intimate, it’s a joy to see what shape a friendship can take; what it can be capable of.
Before Nerida left for Canada, she helped her mom move out of the house where the uncivil ceremony had been held. “I was helping my mum and I was thinking that if I don’t ever end up having a relationship or kids, I would actually love to just be that person who is, like, fucking there for people when they need someone,” she tells me. “If your mum dies, I will come and cook for you every single day. If you need to move, I will be there.”
Maddi agrees, noting that this kind of attitude isn’t necessarily an indictment against having kids or finding a long-term partner but simply a way of imagining a future where you have more resources to offer your friends than people with families do. “I think there’s something really nice about being more of an independent agent, where you can give your friends all of this time,” she says. “It would be good to be the person who can just turn up at a moment’s notice and who potentially has more of a disposable income.” And it’s not just about single people being able to give friends the care they need—single people can also be most likely to need this kind of care in return.
A 2022 study titled “Differentiating the impact of family and friend social support for single mothers on parenting and internalizing symptoms”6 looked to compare the type of support single mothers were given from family and friends. Researchers found that while both kinds of support were important, they were also quite distinct from one another. While both family and friends were able to provide parenting support, only the support of single mothers’ friends resulted in fewer internalizing symptoms, like sadness, depression, loneliness, anxiety, and social withdrawal. Friends can be there for single moms in ways that most people’s families can’t.
According to a 2019 study by the Pew Research Center,7 the US has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. They’re also far less likely to live in extended families. When thinking about the importance of friendships between single people, we can’t just focus on those that grow before someone falls in love, gets married, or has kids—we should also focus on the friendships people need after relationships break down and they become single again.
Being the single friend doesn’t mean being the desperate friend, the party friend, or the selfish friend, just as being the friend with kids or a long-term partner shouldn’t mean being reduced to domesticity, baby shower catch-ups, and dinner parties where only other couples are welcome. The joy of imagining the future of friendship comes in accepting its uncertainty—the knowledge that if none of life’s guarantees are actually that, there is always a new path to tread, even if it’s alongside people you might not have expected.
When I receive Max Dickins’s out-of-office email response telling me he is on his honeymoon, I’m delighted, but not entirely surprised. After all, I’d just spent the weekend reading about his wedding plans. When we eventually meet over Zoom, Max has just returned to his home in London after ten days in Tuscany with his new wife, Naomi.
In the opening chapter of his book Billy No-Mates: How I Realized Men Have a Friendship Problem,8 Max is shopping for an engagement ring for Naomi with his former housemates, Philippa and Hope. That evening, alone in his apartment, Max tries to draft a list of friends he might consider asking to be his best man, after being probed by Philippa while browsing jewelry stores. He comes up short. With ten names in front of him, Max realizes he hasn’t spoken to some of these guys for years. When he checks his recent texts, Max sees he hasn’t sent or received a message from a friend in two months. Somewhere between meeting Naomi and wanting to propose to her, his male friendships had all but disappeared.
Despite Max’s close friendships with Hope and Philippa, the idea of not having a single male friend close enough to be seriously considered for his best man was overwhelming and, he admits, a little embarrassing. In the not-so-distant past, Max had plenty of male friends—friends made in college and through work—but at one of the most pivotal moments of his life, he looked around and realized they were no longer there.
“My journey to friendlessness was not dramatic, it was the logical endpoint of a very gentle curve,” he writes. “It was feigning illness to get out of going to a party. It was turning down an invite to football because ‘I’ve got to work this weekend.’ It was bumping into an old friend and saying, ‘We must have a drink—I’ll text you,’ knowing I wouldn’t. Friendship has a rhythm and I had lost it.”
When I speak to Max, I want to get his thoughts on the way long-term, mostly happy romantic relationships intersect with our friendships. While I use the phrase “mostly happy” in a nod to the fact that no relationship is perfect, Max describes these kinds of real-world relationships as “dynamic.” After six years with Naomi, he’s comfortable admitting that while a lot of the time—most of the time—their relationship is fantastic, there are always downs to balance the many, many ups.
Since realizing he’d let many of his closest friendships slip from his grasp, Max has given a lot of thought to what his connections with his friends, or lack thereof, can tell him about himself. On a practical level, it was easy to connect the dots and figure out why he wasn’t being invited to the pub anymore, after repeatedly rejecting invitations. But to get to the heart of why he’d left many of his friendships to die on the vine, he had to dig a bit deeper. “On a more holistic level, your friendships can be reflective of where you’re at emotionally,” he tells me. “Like, are you self-aware? Are you investing in your emotional intelligence? Are you looking after your mental health? A lot of men don’t consider self-care a big part of friendships or their romantic relationship.”
A study titled “Unique ways in which the quality of friendships matter for life satisfaction”9 investigated how friendships interact with our intimate relationships. Researchers found that when people were highly satisfied with their love life, they were generally happy, regardless of the quality of their friendships. However, if someone was unsatisfied in their romantic relationship, they only reported being happy if they had good friends. It could be easy to look at a study like this and find confirmation that, yes, love is all you need. But the expectation that relationships can be good all the time isn’t just unrealistic, it’s impossible.
Sometimes, when I feel like hurting my own feelings with a heavy hit of nostalgia, I’ll scroll back through text message threads and email conversations I had with friends before I was in a serious relationship—when I had half the familial obligations and double the free time I do now. Almost every day for months at a time, my friend Tim and I would email each other links to Thought Catalog articles with titles like “23 Things That Will Cause a Shame Spiral In Your 20s” and subject lines like “This will be us if we ever get boyfriends!” We no longer share a constant barrage of screenshots and links and date updates with one another because we’re both in long-term relationships that aren’t just private but are constant—in a lovely, but also kind of boring way. In a mostly happy long-term relationship, it’s impossible to re-create those years of stickiness where everything from boyfriends to jobs to roommates felt replaceable, but friendships never did.
Many of the topics Max explores in his book—which we cover during our call—focus on male friendships, but they’re not all exclusive to straight men who have woken up one day and found themselves distanced from the people they once felt closest to. Dolly Alderton writes about similar experiences in her memoir Everything I Know About Love.10 When thinking about the shift that occurs when a friend gets into a new relationship, Dolly writes that everything can change.
“These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not,” she writes. “Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends, then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like.” And it’s not just in my imagination. Or Max’s. Or Dolly’s. According to research on the intersection of romance and friendship, the distance many people in relationships feel from their close friends is common.
In an interview with The Atlantic,11 renowned friendship researcher Robin Dunbar—best known for his theory Dunbar’s Number, that people can’t have more than 150 meaningful relationships—referred to his study, which found that falling in love will cost you exactly two friendships. “If you meet a new person, fall in love, and get married, then you’re investing a lot of time and mental energy in that relationship. And from our data, it seems that you essentially sacrifice two people,” said Dunbar.
This concept centers on Dunbar’s belief that most people’s inner circle is restricted to five individuals. However, due to the closeness people feel with their lovers, along with the time, effort, and attention these relationships generally require, Dunbar believes a new relationship actually takes up two friendship “rations.” Then it’s a domino effect—two friends fall out from that inner circle into a wider one, pushing other people from that circle outward, and so on.
For people who like to keep their friends close, Dunbar’s findings may be a bummer to hear. Nobody wants to lose a close friend—especially for the sake of a new boyfriend or girlfriend, no matter how attractive or charming they are. But this kind of friendship sacrifice can have a serious impact on the future of your relationship too. This new love who was so thrilling can slowly, over many years, become boring if you make the mistake of letting go of all the other relationships in your life.
In Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence,12 every millennial woman’s favorite psychotherapist, Esther Perel, says that adult intimacy has become overburdened with expectations. “Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity,” writes Perel. “At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?”
Perel’s work is so popular because it explains how long-term relationships begin to feel stale, even when they are still filled with love and emotional affection. By expecting a partner to also be a best friend, Perel believes, we’re robbing them of the ability to remain mysterious and therefore desirable to us. In her writing, Perel doesn’t often refer to friendship as the answer to the issues that are arising in so many modern relationships, but if our partner shouldn’t be everything to us, who other than our close friends would be best placed to take on some of their duties?
At the end of Billy No-Mates, Max asks Philippa and Hope to lead his bridal party as joint “best women.” That decision, Max tells me, felt even more meaningful after his attempts to reconnect with some of his lost male friends. He never wanted his two friends to feel as though they were chosen because there were no other options—he wanted to choose them because they were the right people for the job. It’s easier to label someone a close friend when you have other, less close but still meaningful friendships to compare them to.
Before we end our call, I ask Max if he’s felt a shift in his relationship with Naomi since he started investing in his friendships more. I’m curious about the emotional impact on his relationship, now that he’s spending more time with friends, dedicating more attention to them, and opening up to them about his mental health.
“Naomi is often holding me to account when it comes to my friendships. On one level, this is out of concern for my happiness. But it is also totemic: the strength of my friendships, my investment in my social world, is a microcosm of my investment in myself,” he tells me. “This all rolls back around to our marriage eventually, of course. What will make you a better friend will make you a better spouse. Because if I am investing in my mental health, if I am rejuvenating myself in the healing spring of the social world, then I will be, as they say, strong enough for two.”
I relate to Naomi a lot at this moment, not just because we’re both women in heterosexual relationships or because we both deeply love the people we are with, but because we both clearly recognize the immeasurable value of our partner’s friendships. This is why one of the things I love most about my own partner is the closeness and depth of his friendships.
I see the care my partner puts into his friendships. When I witness him keeping traditions with his friends who have been closer to him far longer than I have, I know that the traditions we have with each other will also last. When I see him reach for his phone or excuse himself to take a call from a friend—not out of obligation but pure delight—I can imagine that when it’s me on the other end of the line, his face brightens just the same way. The excited inflection of the “hello mate” he reserves for his closest friends reminds me of the steadfastness of his words, his loyalty, his excitement, and his gratitude for the people who know him best. His inner circle is such a joyous place to be, I’m thankful for the fact other people are lucky enough to experience it too. His love is more real because I’m not the only one to feel it.
Just as it is important to recognize the joy of love and affection, it’s vital we take time to sit with the hurt it can cause—specifically, the pain people we love can cause. In her memoir In the Dream House,13 Carmen Maria Machado writes about the role friends can play as witnesses to domestic abuse. Friends are often the first people to notice red eyes after tense phone calls, hear excuses for bad behavior, and pay attention to bruised egos, spirits, or bodies. In the book, Machado writes about her own experience in an abusive relationship, which is peppered with small details of the role her friends played during one of the most complex and difficult periods of her life.
“One day she asks, Who knows about us? It becomes a refrain. It’s strange—in some past generation this could have meant so many things. Who knows we’re together? Who knows we’re lovers? Who knows we’re queer?” writes Machado. “But when she asks, the unspoken reason is awful, deflated of nobility or romance. Who knows that I yell at you like this? Who’s heard about the incident over Christmas?” While reflecting on her broken relationship, Machado shares glimpses of moments her friends witnessed, including the night she fell asleep while watching a movie with friends, only to wake to a barrage of missed calls from her former partner, who was convinced Machado was cheating on her. Sometime later, after Machado and her partner had broken up, one of these same friends stopped her from answering a call from her ex, which they both knew could easily have led to their reunion.
While the exact moments, tensions, and people Machado describes in her memoir are unique, less so is the situation she found herself in. Madison Griffiths met Theo* at a party. They had mutual friends, and unlike some people, she was drawn to his eccentricity, rather than puzzled by it. Theo was unconventional, not particularly personable, and often judgmental, constantly cycling through jobs and raising alarm bells for Madison’s family. But she was enthralled. Within three months of meeting, they were officially dating. “He had a real chip on his shoulder,” Madison tells me. “He was the sort of guy who thought everyone else was wrong because he was always right. I was the opposite kind of person. I thought everyone I met had great qualities, but I was also […] going through an identity crisis.”
As we talk, Madison describes her relationship with Theo as a fever dream. Like many others who have endured abusive relationships, Madison felt that she was the only person who truly understood Theo, as if she were the only person who could help him. At times, it felt easy to justify his behavior—the yelling, the threats, the name-calling—by blaming his past experience with drug psychosis. Sometimes it was easy to feel as though everyone else was just being too hard on him. When Theo told Madison he was going overseas, her friends and parents begged her not to follow him—but she did.
Madison wanted to see Theo, but she too was concerned about her decision. “A few nights before I left […] I sent him some messages saying, ‘I’m nervous I’m going to come and you’re going to, you know, do what you do,’” she tells me. “That was my code word for his cruel behavior.” As soon as she arrived, Madison knew she’d made a mistake. Their time apart had only left Theo more emboldened than ever.
First, Madison left for a nearby country, to stay with two friends she’d met years earlier. They made space for her and cared for her. They chopped Madison’s long dark hair into a bob (Theo had always hated her hair short). They insisted Madison stay with them for Christmas. Instead, Theo called and invited her back. She wrote her friends a card and left in the middle of the night.
Before Madison had left, a different friend suggested she record the next fight she had with Theo. Their hope was that she could relisten to the argument in the sobering light of day and realize that she shouldn’t be treated like this. So she did. She recorded Theo’s taunts. After listening to them the following morning she called a friend, Kelly, and said she needed to get back to Australia. Kelly sent her seven hundred dollars and told her to get on the next flight home. And that’s exactly what she did.
Madison tells me there was a simple reason she reached out to her friends, rather than her parents: She knew it would be easier for her friends not to judge her need for help. “They didn’t have that parental feeling that they’d failed or hadn’t been able to protect me from this person or that they had in some way enabled the relationship,” says Madison. Her parents had tried to stop her from going by telling her they weren’t going to help her fund the trip if she got in trouble. Unsure of how to handle such a distressing situation, they inadvertently made themselves off-limits in Madison’s time of need. Madison tells me that she would rather have stayed overseas for another three months, waiting for the flight she had already booked to come home, than ask her parents for money.
I think about the power dynamics that can often exist between us and our parents as we reach our late teens, then our early twenties. A parent’s not liking a boyfriend, a tattoo, a haircut, or a decision to quit your job rarely feels as consequential as it would if you got the same feedback from a friend—even if the issues raised by a parent were just as valid, if not more so. While Madison was struggling with the power dynamics of domestic abuse, the thought of battling with her parents was too overwhelming to even consider.
When Madison landed back in Australia, on the flight Kelly had paid for, another friend picked her up from the airport and took her home to offer her a shower, wash her clothes, feed her—to mother her—until she was ready to face her real mother.
Survivors of domestic abuse often describe a silent belief that if they don’t have their partner, they might have no one. Madison—like many survivors, including Machado—worked extremely hard to keep her pain contained, neatly bundled in layers and layers of excuses and secrets to avoid having the unsightly truth about her relationship leak out. But whenever the truth about Theo did bleed into her life outside her relationship, it was her friends who noticed it seeping through a forgotten gap.
When I ask Madison about the record-keeping her friends were doing, which enabled them to understand how to help her as soon as she was ready, she refers to it as “the labor of witnessing.” It wasn’t until she was home safely, her hair still sitting short above her shoulders, that she was able to ask a friend to listen to the recording of that final fight. In a second, the truth was no longer being protected, wrapped, or stored away—it was being shared in a moment of vulnerability during which Madison was saying to her friend, Don’t let this happen to me again.
According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence,14 one in four women and one in nine men have experienced severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner sexual violence, or have been stalked by an intimate partner, resulting in such consequences as injury, fearfulness, and posttraumatic stress. When thinking about the ways our romantic relationships and friendships intersect, it feels grim to consider domestic abuse a reason to keep your most trusted friends within reach. However, isolation is a tactic used by many abusers, who work to create physical and emotional separation between their victims and their support networks. To ignore this reality would be to ignore the experiences of millions of people in this country who have survived domestic violence. And it would be to turn away from those who didn’t.
There are many ways a relationship can come to an end, just as there are many ways to fall in love. Sometimes relationships end because of mistreatment, broken trust, or infidelity. People can fall out of love. People die. Regardless of how happy a relationship is in the beginning, the middle, or even at the end, it’s never possible to know how something will end. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, an imperfect relationship can transition into something just as worthwhile: a friendship.
When I speak to Rebecca (Bec) Shaw and Ally Garrett, they’re sitting together on a couch in the apartment Ally shares with her partner. They have plans to head out together that night, and Bec’s girlfriend Freya is going along too. I’ve intruded on their Sunday afternoon because I want to ask them about their past relationship and very present friendship.
“I thought Bec was hot, so I decided to hit on her. But unfortunately, because of who Bec is as a person, it took us a really long time to get together,” Ally jokes, remembering how she and Bec started dating, years earlier. From the beginning, it was a relationship easily confused with friendship. First, by Bec who missed Ally’s very obvious attraction to her and unsubtle seduction tactics. Then, by a friend of Ally’s who came home to find the two watching a movie together and decided to join them for the rest of the night, completely unaware that it was, in fact, a first date she was crashing. While they were dating, Bec was in an open relationship with a different primary partner. Bec and Ally spent six months together before they felt a shift in the relationship; a little messiness with a few mistakes made on both sides, but mostly just a shared feeling that what they had was petering out. They didn’t break up as much as they just went back to being friends, now with a new degree of closeness.
“Bec and I still have a lot of emotional intimacy in our friendship,” Ally tells me. “Whenever I’m about to do or think something awful, Bec is who I text first. I have a lot of very close friends, but Bec is still that number one.”
“I think part of us dating was that I wanted to be friends with Ally,” says Bec. “We dated because we got along really well and that’s also why we have a great friendship now.”
I ask Bec and Ally why they think people in the queer community—Bec is a lesbian, while Ally is bisexual—seem to find it easier to be friends with their exes than most straight people I know. There are a few factors, they tell me. First, the community is a lot smaller, especially in Australian towns and cities. “If you cut out everyone in Sydney who you or your friends had had a thing with, you’d soon run out of people to be friends with,” says Bec.
The second reason is that many people in the community have a more fluid approach to relationships, whether it be through ethical non-monogamy or polyamory. And while there are plenty of couples in monogamous relationships—like those that Bec and Ally are currently in with new partners—there’s less likely to be judgment around the blurred lines that can make it easier to go from friends to lovers, then back again. Bec tells me that the first day her current girlfriend landed in Sydney from Aotearoa (New Zealand), they went straight to Ally’s house for Christmas lunch.
“If you were to imagine that it was a straight relationship, where someone was like, ‘My long-distance girlfriend is landing and we’re going to my ex’s for Christmas,’ it would probably be a huge red flag to a straight woman,” Ally tells me. But for them, it’s different. What I’m most curious about when speaking to Bec and Ally is how being romantically involved has influenced the obvious closeness of their friendship. Beyond the physical intimacy that comes with a romance, there is also a vulnerability that grows within that familiarity. When dating someone, we’re more likely to open up about our past relationships and hopes for the future, and surface our deepest wounds, which may take far longer to share with a new friend. This was Bec and Ally’s experience, at least.
By dating first, they were able to fast-forward their friendship to the place it is now, where they’ve been able to continue holding on to the best parts of their connection, while leaving other layers of intimacy behind. Without the stress of wondering “Is this going to end?” or “What are we to each other?” their friendship has been able to flourish.
During our conversation, Bec and Ally have both good and bad things to say about their experiences with non-monogamy. But the one thing that rings true for them both is the lesson these kinds of relationships teach you about love: that you can’t expect one person to fulfill all of your needs. In non-monogamous relationships, these other needs are filled by different partners, dates, and hook-ups. But for people like Ally and Bec, who can recognize this value while still wanting to be in an exclusive, monogamous relationship, it’s now about considering how friends can fill the spaces in your life that no single partner would ever be able to do.
In many straight—and some queer—relationships, a lack of trust is what prevents people from being friends with former lovers or becoming friends with people they may also be attracted to. Of course, trust is the foundation of every healthy relationship. There’s the trust that someone won’t leave you, even if they talk to or spend time with someone they could also be sexually attracted to. But the trust that is just as important is the kind that allows your partner to fill their life with as many smart, funny, interesting, caring, and good-looking people as they wish, without jeopardizing your closeness at all. To me, that kind of trust is the real hallmark of success.
In Boy Friends, Michael Pedersen considers the need for a contract for friendship. We have contracts for marriages and employment, he points out, why not for our friendships too?
Despite my love of the frivolity and festivity of weddings, I’ve had trouble seeing the true value of marriage for myself. It’s something I’ve spoken at length about with my partner, my friends, and my family. So why did I find this idea of a friendship contract so intriguing? Why, when I can find such comfort, commitment and happiness in my own relationship, without the need for a traditional ceremony and marriage certificate, would I ever wish to apply that same formality to my friendships? After all, isn’t the fact that we aren’t tempted to bind friendships in contracts part of what makes them special?
To me, declarations and celebrations of friendship, like Nerida’s and Maddi’s, feel deeply symbolic. In them, I see a sign of changing tides when it comes to the hierarchy of love. But a contract will never be a real replacement for commitment—not in friendship or romantic love. At least, the act of marriage will never replace the kind of emotional commitment truly required to keep loving someone, caring for them, and letting them really see you for the rest of your life.
Instead of a friendship contract, perhaps the only way to really build an equilibrium between our lovers and friends is to treat the former more like the latter, not the other way around. In a world where marriage didn’t exist—or at least wasn’t the measure of personal and societal success it is today—perhaps we could view our romances more like we do our closest friendships: as relationships that are not governed or guaranteed by the very act of signing your names alongside witnesses, but as relationships that will be as long and strong as the continual effort you put into them. Valuing romantic partnerships above all else hasn’t stopped the need for divorce or saved millions of people from heartbreak, and yet society remains committed to the idea that romantic love is always the answer. Why?
I’ve come to realize that the belief that marriage is a promise of stability leads us to assume romantic relationships can be effortless. But to me, this idea only distracts from the consistent effort my partner and I put into our love and the dedication it requires to keep loving someone for who they are, as well as who they are becoming. I believe people can be a close-to-perfect match (my partner and I included), but I also believe the stories we tell ourselves about romantic love are holding us back. If soulmates really do exist, who’s to say they can’t be a friend?