I barely felt the punch to my face that one of the other two landed after I had barrelled into the third and pushed him off her. I only noticed the blood cascading down my chin after the three fled from a passing police car. The next day, we joked about how ridiculous I looked with three stitches in my lip.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when Laura went from “best friend” to “chosen family” – just that as an only child, she’s the sister I found, rather than grew up with.
We met in 2012, as two young Americans in Strasbourg who had been invited to a Thanksgiving dinner. And from then on, our lives shadowed each other’s, through the Easters, Thanksgivings, Christmases, New Year’s Eves and birthdays that draw you close and the early adult wanderings that fling you far away.
She read the first drafts of things I was writing and kept me company from a distance the year that I spent living and working in southern Chad. The next year, we both found ourselves studying in Paris, where we memorised poems together in the kitchen of my student houseshare and volleyed verbal banter while on our way to share a côte de boeuf at the brasserie down the street.
She fielded an annoying quantity of “What should I reply to this girl I like?” texts. She sat with me for hours, days, weeks as I went on endless mental loops over heartbreak number one, and then heartbreak number two, and then told me enough was enough and took me to the Opéra Garnier for a performance of La Voix Humaine (Francis Poulenc’s one-act opera whose libretto consists of a woman’s last phone conversation with her lover). If I was going to be dramatic, it might as well be in a dramatic setting.
Along the way, I learned that Laura would drain her bank account for a train ticket to see her friends, that her favourite year was 1848 and that life hadn’t been just a series of roses – that she had once, like me, made a little bald spot from anxiously pulling her hair. Maybe above all, we’ve simply shown up for each other when it mattered.
Aristotle saw friends as mirrors for each other, shared souls dwelling in two bodies, and Epicurus wrote that true friendship is a blessing unlike any other in life. “In its broadest sense, in the eyes of the ancients, friendship was the principle that held together society, and even the universe,” according to Arnaud Suspène, a professor of ancient history at the Université d’Orléans.
With the advent of Romantic-era thought and industrial capitalism, though, society prioritised the nuclear family above the “village”, and focused on romantic coupledom as the pinnacle of what might exist between two people. What is the combined weight of all the literature and lyrics, performance and paint, melody and monument, devoted to romantic relationships? How much, in comparison, to friendship?
A romantic link is, at its best, full of beauty and depth. But from millennial nostalgia for living with friends at college to boomers retiring together – and perhaps fuelled by the experience of Covid lockdowns – there is an increasing focus on treating our friendships with care.
A spate of recent and forthcoming books, including Just Friends, A Fire Beside You and Modern Friendship, discuss concepts such as “platonic life partner”, reflect on friendships as a last institution untouched by market logic and offer advice on how to strengthen them. Could the emotional depth that adults are capable of, for example, be combined with something that children and adolescents use to form strong bonds: unstructured free time to play and invent?
But even as society has become more open to varied types of romantic linkings, the space occupied by friendships between straight men and straight women remains small. On-screen millennial reference-points for true platonic emotional depth are relatively few – Joey and Phoebe in Friends, perhaps, or Harry and Hermione.
That’s all the more unfortunate because it’s left too many of us without counterexamples to the ways that adults tend to sexualise interactions between little boys and little girls, even from the youngest age. Even among my peers, I see the reflex towards this. “He’s going to be a heartbreaker,” crooned at a baby boy. Or perhaps “No boys, not yet!” said jokingly to a baby girl.
Men in particular are suffering a crisis of loneliness and adriftness, and a good portion of this is self-imposed via stifling traditional gender norms. According to Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, too often male friendships end up being emotionally stunted: stuck in banter alone with too much left unacknowledged, such as how much we really mean to each other.
Perhaps breaking apart the scepticism around friendships between straight men and straight women can hold a more universal lesson – one that can help us all (not just men) be more emotionally connected with everyone who, as Aristotle might have said, we have “shared a sack of salt with”.
In the summer of 2023, I joined Laura’s bachelorette weekend in the south of France, signed my name as her witness at their town hall marriage, and was a “bridesman” at the wedding ceremony that followed.
In precisely the middle of this succession of events, I felt something unexpected. Fear that somehow the fact of her being officially “married” would change our friendship.
