Haven’t you ever experienced how the more you get to know someone, the more beautiful they grow in your eyes – until you can scarcely imagine someone more beautiful that you could ever behold? That, of course, is when I know I truly love someone – maybe am even just a little bit in love with them. Contrary to what all the romances tell me, though, this is not just the feeling that lets me know I’ve found “the one.” (I don’t know that I even believe in the concept of “the one.”)
When I learnt art, it was from drawing my friends’ faces over and over – a compulsive study of what made them so utterly captivating that my eyes couldn’t let them go, a frenetic quest to map out the exquisite contours and landmarks of their faces with mere pencil strokes on paper. After all, to draw someone you must fall in love with them, at least a little bit. There is so much looking that must be done, so much effort that goes into every little last detail you want to so painstakingly capture.
From my earliest days, friendship always seemed like so much more of a complicated, messy, nuanced thing than anyone ever accounts for. It’s supposed to be effortless – you hang out with someone, and either you experience an instant click with them, or you hang out with them long enough by the coincidence of common social circles, that you start planning ways to spend even more time together. Why, then, did I always feel like the one on the outside, looking in? Was I really that unlikeable – I wept to myself – that I was forever doomed to be nothing more than an afterthought? To me, building a friendship was like building castles on the shifting sands of the beach – one could never know when the next tidal wave came in, and the very ground fell out from under your feet. I clung to the few friendships I had like they were the only thing that saved me from drowning.
And so, for every friendship I considered myself lucky to fall into, for every girl I really got to know as a friend – I fell, at least a little bit, in love. I could conceive of no higher soulmates than the ones whom I called friend. Into my friendships, I poured every bit of romance that my passionate heart possessed; even today, I can’t say I’ve ever quite gotten out of the habit. Even the casual touches my friends shared among themselves felt intimidating and electrifying all at the same time. But whenever I asked what it was that really distinguished friendship from romance, all the answer I got was that romance was always between a boy and a girl, and that they could never be just friends. I would wonder, in utter confusion, why I was even expected to be with a boy – to love one, to marry one – when I had all this richness and intensity of feeling for the girls around me, something that could never be matched even by the boy-crushes I convinced myself I had.
When I look back over my life, it has only ever made sense to me in retrospect. The process of uncovering different aspects of myself, over the years, has been painfully slow, but infinitely rewarding. I know now that I am a lesbian, and that my sexual attraction sparks irregularly and almost unpredictably, but grows only when I feel emotionally close to someone (demisexuality). I know now that I am neurodivergent, and most likely on the autism spectrum. I know now that there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with me, that I was simply (and still am) different than what deeply entrenched social norms dictated I should be. These labels help me understand how their intersection has completely shaped the way I see and understand and interact with the world, and the people in it. But even coming out as gay – to myself and to others – did not help make sense of everything.
In 2022, just two years after I’d come out to myself, things started to change between me and my best friend at the time, who later became my first girlfriend. We hung out all the time, and it seemed we could never get enough of each other’s company – we cuddled, shared meals, planned out our days together, had endless discussions about art and books and TV shows and our futures, we saw each other first thing in the morning and last thing before we retired to our beds. I felt my heart flutter every time she took my hand in hers, and even otherwise. But I did not know if she felt the same. There was really nothing between us, I reasoned, that two good friends could not share. After all, I’d seen my share of intimate friendships between girls. But the longer we went without acknowledging the romance that had blossomed between us, the more my heart felt like it was tearing itself apart.
Earlier this year, for the first time in my life I found myself caught up in a friends-with-benefits situation, but the very term confused me in my sometimes frustratingly literal brain. The conception of romance, as I’d imbibed from all the implicit messaging that surrounds us, was a good friendship combined with sexual attraction. We flirted, bantered verging on the argumentative, lamented the state of the world together, and shared deep emotional confidences. Yet, we’d agreed that we wouldn’t enter into a romance at all, that we couldn’t see ourselves as romantic partners. When I made art for her to comfort her in her distress, I had no intention of doing anything I wouldn’t do for one I called a close friend, though I did have an intense crush on her. But she, touched and confused, thought I was asking for more; I had the agonising realisation that my gestures may come across differently to someone who was not just a straight friend. Our arrangement did not survive for much longer.
My romances, whether they have lasted or not, have always ripened thus from the blossoming of all the beautiful things that make up my friendships. And the line we draw between friendship and romance has only ever been one that we draw, by ourselves, in the sand – sometimes, it even gets blurred by the coming and going of the waves. With my current romantic partner, as with my first one, we started out as friends who eventually landed on the same page about our romantic feelings for each other. Once we’d acknowledged ourselves as partners and lovers, it’s taken me by surprise how except for the pleasing topping of romance (in the words of another dear friend), the core of the relationship remains relatively unchanged. What makes our bond precious is the essentially satisfying friendship we share.
The fact of the matter is, I could never be the kind of low-maintenance friend that was once glorified by social media. Even now, I lean (heavily) on my friends, and I’m happy for them to lean on me, too. I have a friend I call my queerplatonic partner, and I have others I simply call best friends. My closest friends have always felt like my partners, in some shape or form, whether or not we call ourselves that. I have always been in love with my friends. And so many of us have had those friendships we call our ride-or-dies, wherein we share our lives together in so many fulfilling ways. Truly, friendship is what we choose to make of it.
But our friendships, all too often, get sadly pushed aside when a romantic partner comes into the picture. All too often, romance is treated as the be-all and end-all of relationships: good friends are often pressured to become lovers, and even narratives of friendship get compressed into those of romance; so much so that I cannot resist using romantic language as a shorthand for the intensity of my friendships (the instant click/spark). Therefore, when I first came across the framework of relationship anarchy, everything seemed to fall into place. Here was something that challenged this all too prevalent centring of coupledom, that put into words the way I’d always instinctively seen the world – where I treat my lovers like my friends, and I treat my friends like my lovers, if they will let me.
Perhaps all the different parts that make up the person I am (my a/sexuality, my gender, my neurotype) have aligned to make me fundamentally compatible with this worldview. To embrace it, though – to practice that standard of care and love, undistinguished by the designation of the relationship, but in reflection of the closeness one feels – is a conscious decision on my part. The relationship anarchy framework recognises that we are all capable of multiplicities in our relationships – that we are all different in the way we treat each kind of relationship in our lives – and encourages us all to embrace this ambiguity. For here is fertile ground for not rigidity, but playfulness, in all our friendships, romances, and everything that blurs the borders we’ve made in between.
Cover image by Jamie Street on Unsplash
