In Defense of Romantic Friendship
On resisting a lonely age.
In her TED talk, Dr. Marisa G Franco says that she once wrote a love letter to her best friend. "I love you,” she wrote, “I feel like I've known you for many lives, and I will know you for many lives to come."
"And you know what I felt in the moment?" She asks the audience, "Shame. Shame at loving a friend too deeply. So I took that card, I put it in my basket, and I never sent it. Why do we get so much less permission now to share love with our friends than with our spouses?"
I experienced a painful spark of recognition in her words. How often have I held back from telling people in my life just how much I love them, how much they mean to me, how much I think about them, how much I yearn to share their presence, just because doing so felt somehow perverse? More times than I care to admit.
As sexual romance has become the pre-eminent form of intimacy, deep friendships are made less and even shameful. This delivers a shuddering blow to the human condition. We need love — lots of love. Not from a single person, but from many: mothers and fathers, spouses or lovers, brothers and sisters, mentors and mentees, and friends.
I am eternally grateful that sexual romance is liberated, not least because I have the social support and acceptance to love my life partner, Jonathan. Gay equality is one of the greatest achievements of the past century, and I'm a direct beneficiary of moving marriage away from the coldness of contracts and business deals into romance. But the ascendance of sexual romance has placed a chokehold on human connection. In elevating it, we are suffocating ourselves. Erotic partnership is one of the greatest forces in the human condition and one of our deepest joys. So is friendship.
In her book Platonic, Marisa G Franco explores and defends “romantic friendship.”
We can feel passionate about someone (romantic love) without wanting to have sex with them (sexual love). This means we can feel romance in the confines of friendship. There’s even a term for it—“romantic friendship.” Throughout history, romance has been a part of friendship, arguably even more so than it was a part of marriage. The first definition of love alluded to friends: to “be pleased with, to regard with affection. We love a man who has done us a favor.”
The word "romantic" here is a trip wire that may confound the topic from the get-go, and you are welcome to change the word for yourself if that suits you better. I often prefer the term “intimate friendship”, which is less fraught, but we will use “romantic friendship” in this article because it is the term used in the literature on the history of friendship.
In this context, “romantic” does not mean "sexual," or the love one has for a spouse. It does mean yearning, a (healthy) possessiveness, wanting to spend time together, displays of physical and emotional affection, vulnerability, and idealization. "Eros will have naked bodies," writes C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves, "Friendship will have naked personalities."
In a modern context, perhaps it is best to think of romantic friendships as platonic relationships that exhibit affection, care, and emotional intimacy that is culturally relegated to sexual romance. In sexual romance, partners make time for each other, express affection for each other, make commitments to each other, and feel deeply and passionately for each other. Romantic friends exhibit these same traits in a platonic context, and there is no good reason for friendship not to include these features.
For most of human history, romantic friendship was the norm. It is our current age that is dislocated and alienated from the gifts of romantic friendship. I have already written about the extraordinary vows of friendship in the ancient world, and I encourage you to read that article. Franco gives a few examples of romantic friendship in more recent history:
At a time when love wasn’t monopolized by spouses, remnants of romance were apparent among famous friends of the past. Alexander Pope, the English poet, wrote to Jonathan Swift, the satirist, “It is an honest truth, there’s no one living or dead of whom I think oft’ner, or better than yourself.” Herman Melville, who penned Moby-Dick, wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.” And Frederick Douglass proclaimed that leaving friends was the hardest part of escaping the plantation: “The thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most painful thought with which I had to contend. The love of them was my tender point and shook my decision more than all things else.”
“Romantic love in friendship isn’t radical,” she concludes, “It’s traditional if you peek back far enough into our history.” Romantic friendship is not perverse, salacious, or rare. It is the natural course friendship often takes when it is allowed to grow of its own accord.
Perhaps we fear that romantic friendship will make us less available to those we love, inspire jealousy, or that there can only be “one,” just as there is often one in sexual partnership. This fear sets romantic friendship against sexual romance and places it in a zero-sum game between two vital loves. This is all unnecessary.
The great beauty of friendship is its adoration without jealousy. I yearn for the presence of my friends, but I do not feel jealous that I am not their only friend, nor am I jealous of their spouses or lovers. To the contrary, my friendship with another is made richer by their other connections. As C.S. Lewis observed of his circle of friends after the death of Charles Williams,
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’
My husband does not have less of me because I love others just as deeply, though differently, as I love him. He has more of me because I am made more fully myself by all the other humans who have blessed me with their love. Similarly, everyone I love has a fuller version of me because I am made more myself by the love of my husband.
We are in a plague of loneliness. This is a multi-causal phenomenon which includes geographical isolation, digital media, the decline of meaning-making institutions, and a myriad other cultural shifts. For our purposes here, I set my sights on our elevation of sexual romance and our suspicion of any intimate relationship outside that charmed circle. This ravages human connection, particularly for male friendships, which are laced with paranoia about being gay.
The taboo against romantic friendship places a ceiling on how close a friendship can become. When a friendship goes deep enough and shares affection, it will often start to glow with the inner radiance of romantic friendship. Rejecting this leaves people mired in the shallows.
As Franco writes,
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. In the 1970s, in the feminist journal Ain’t I a Woman?, a woman wrote that she shared close and affectionate love toward her friends until she read that these feelings warranted psychiatric counseling. She felt “hopelessly dirty and sick. I became suspicious of any uncontrollable emotions and motives my strange new self might have.”
My new spiritual practice is standing against this tide and expressing genuine affection to my friends when it's right to do so, and they can receive it. I tell my friends I love them, and I write them letters. I tell them how much they mean to me. I tell them that I think they are awesome and that I want to spend time with them. I tell them the best I see in them. This practice deepens the bond between us, enlarges my affection for them, and yes, allows romantic friendship to bloom with both men and women.
The most powerful discovery I’ve made with this practice is that what we internalize as weird, taboo, and shameful is exactly what people are dying of thirst for. We are all going through life wanting to be loved, seen, and accepted. We all want to know that we matter to someone and that we are a light to someone else's eyes.
As I was reading Franco’s Platonic, I realized that I had never told my best friend that he is my best friend. This struck me as an urgent and immense tragedy, a gigantic oversight.
"I want you to know," I told him on the phone, "That you are my best friend, that I love you, that I love spending time with you, and that I'm sad when I don't get to."
He choked up on the phone. "Stephen," he said, holding back tears, "You've never said something like that to me before."
“I know,” I said, “and I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long to say it.”
If I had listened to the cultural gag order on men expressing affection for each other, I would never have said these words. We would have gone many long years never saying these words to each other, and my heart aches to think of that possibility.
My challenge to everyone reading this is to tell your friends that you love them. Display your affection. Tell them how much they mean to you. Write them letters. Take them on dates. Prioritize time with them. Take this up as a spiritual practice, just as you do with prayer, meditation, or physical fitness. Practice it as if your life depends on it, because it does. The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our relationships.
And, when the bud of romantic friendship blooms, as it likely will, do not fear. This is good, and you do not need to be afraid.
But that’s just me. What do you think? Let me know in the comments section, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.
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Gosh darn it, Stephen. This is why I love your posts. I have friends I keep yearning to tell how much I love them and yet I swallow it down for fear of the shame it would bring. It's like I'm a cat happily bringing them a precious hunting success and yet I expect they'll react like it's actually a half-dead bird I'm laying at their feet.
So your post will encourage me to do the thing after all and might therefore be life-changing.
[stands up clapping] Yaysss! Down with loneliness! Up with love!
Strong invitation, brother.
At fifty, I can attest to the challenge of regaining that more romantic version of self that I used to embody as a younger man. You've said it better, but I've long attested to the romantic arc of love shared between friends.
The confusion with intimacy has been central to my failures in many friendships, specifically with women, but also with gay friends who either wanted more than romance from me or vice versa. A younger version of me was often confused. There is a distinction worth knowing, and you walk us through it wisely, Stephen.
One thing is for certain. The older I get, the less I care what people think about my expressions of love. On the back of someone's bathroom door in the States, I found one of those pithy signs that people hang up. It read something like, "Of course I can love you. If people can hate people they've never met, then I can love you."