Since moving, I have - of course - been thinking even more about friendship and acquaintanceship; about loneliness and connection. In a lot of ways I'm not actually lonely since the move... yet.
I definitely feel the need to lay down roots for the coming winter. But between enduring friends just an hour or two afoot, my world's sprinkling of always-present friends, and the first glimmers of friendly acqaintanceship at the preschool, I'm feeling positive and generally supported.
I was reading some dire and depressing articles recently about how very very lonely Millennials are. Sob sob. Damn, you, avocado toast and your instagram account!
I guess 22% report having no friends (20% having no acquaintances?? How do you even do that?), 27% had no close friends. Meanwhile 30% had no best friend.
Kind of surprised at the only 3% difference between close and best friend.
I have friends. I might miss them, but I never doubt they are my friends and thinking of them brings warmth and joy along with that hit of missing. I definitely have close friends and confidants.
Joins the huge minority: A Best Friend, though? I wouldn't say I have one (five to ten besties maybe, but a best friend, no).
Through my life that was an terribly important slot to fill, and if creative book-keeping were required to fill it then so be it. As I get older, the less that category really seems to be a thing.
I'm just not a "my spouse is my best friend" kind of person. Primary adult attachment figure? Absolutely. Bestest buddy of all time... ehh... The man is definitively not friend-zoned, thank you much.
To me, it's an entirely different thing with a sprinkle of crossover elements Andrew's my partner. He's my home base and my other. I love him! I lust for him. I'm fundamentally attached to him and have put the essentials of my life on the table for our union. Our relationship is prioritized right up to the top. I rely on him. We ride the waves of tension that our respective romantic roles still confer. We - at our top game - complement each other with our differences, while working towards shared values and making space for our contrasts. We don't always *get* each other.
I do think that marriage changes friendship. And it may replace the urgency that some of the important functions certain relationships provide. I think as adults, we crave attachment that no longer comes from our parents. We get that in dribs and drabs through a million secondary attachments. But a home base. It matters. I think that's an essential craving. If marriage supplies an attachment figure, well so do besties in their way.
But: The exclusivity. The interdependence. The additional family ties. The ceremonial and legal commitment. The specific sort of physicality. It's a different animal. Kind of. I think. I mean there are elements in that very very best-friend status that overlap, because that role is kind of a strange role. Still best friend and partner feel more contrasting than similar, yin to yang kind of dualistic roles - adult interpretations of models our parental figures provided once upon a time?
It strikes me that all of my "best friends" have been female, despite having often had far more male friends, many of whom populate the highest eschelons of "significant people" in my life.
Perhaps a statement on how thoroughly programmed kids are at a young age (or how fervently I wanted to follow my sister's example), I can remember my first crush and my first best friend emerging at about the same age. They did not overlap at all. Stephanie Shin had two scottie dogs and we loved to run around screaming "You're a DOO DOO head" together. It was a rich relationship.
JT... I actually remember nothing about him. but that I pretended to marry many times. Then I loved Evan Jones for a few school years. I was actually also kind of his friend but mostly because what the heck else do you do with a crush when you're that young and what does it even mean at that age other than wanting to spend time together, but it is still somehow different than just wanting to be friends.
There was a sense of otherness and a desire to show and experience that otherness that was interwoven in the crush-friendship; and a sense of solidarity and commonality and finding sameness in the best-friending. Both were important. I suppose both became elements in adult relationships.
In grade school, I always had a handful of boys & girls I'd roll with/battle with/joke with, and then a "best friend," who took my ultimate fealty. We dressed alike sometimes. Spoke our own dialects of private jokes and vocabularies. Associating ourselves in every way was important. Loyalty mattered a ton and was frequently and subtly betrayed. Reciprocity was essential and a source of mutual anxiety. A little combat companionship was expected, especially on the playground.
Sixth grade blurred up the lines a bit. Nominally, my best friend was a girl from ballet. I barely saw her this year, though, because she had graduated to a higher level.In actuality, I was homeschooling with four boys from my neighborhood, and became inseperable with one of these boys. Not in the usual "I have a crush on you so I'm your friend to be close" kind of way. We enjoyed talking and kind of trusted each other more. The sameness and otherness blended more smoothly.
On a camping trip, I got a nasty splinter that had to be dug out with a few needles and some major blood-letting. (I know right? Just kind of a fun party trick of mine, lodging wood in my body. Aaaaanyways.) Displaying the combat ready loyalty I'd never even imagined of my bestest of best friends, this kid stayed with me and held my hand the whole time. I cried and winced and let my inner wounded animal rage, but there he was. On the drive home, I slept on his shoulder, holding the lilacs he'd brought me as a get-well gift on my lap and his hand in mine. Through it there was this staggeringly safe vulnerability I'd never experienced with a peer. A little paradigm shifting and certainly a moment foretelling that transition from child to adult.
Here was this person making me feel infinitely safe and cared for in a way that felt nothing like an adult in that same role (definitely not a sibling, where our relationship was idolizing and antagonistic in equal measure). It wasn't exactly romantic, because this kind of presence was nothing in my half-baked lexicon of like-liking and Fairy Tale happily ever afters. All happened pre-puberty so the stirring loins had no particular comment to make or not make. It just was.
Maybe a barer foreshadowing of "attachment" and attunement in a less confined box.
Because perhaps at the root of all connection - however you categorize them - is that sense of self blurring into another even while it becomes most clearly itself in the act of that blurring. Of letting go and taking in in equal measures. Energies blending so smoothly there is not one or other but some entirely new thing that holds all without losing any.
Unsurpisingly, the importance and duration of my best-friending developed aggressively post-puberty. Crushes became "feelings" all fraught with hormones and newly developed insecurities and jealousies. Honestly it was a revelation on the other side of my teens to realize that I could have feelings for somebody AND like myself around the same person. Puberty was... confounding on that note. And of course, parents became decreasingly solid and firm. The need for "a rock" of some kind definitely manifested in the best friend. The person I could like myself around. Who could develop selves with me. Who would always be there in the rises and falls of all the other relationships.
In high school, I made a best friend who claimed bestie status until I went off to college. It was an intense relationship full of insecurities and backhanded power dynamics. But also travelling together and all the angst and excitement and creativity explosions of that age. The highs were high. The lows... vertiginous. We built and traded our identities. I still remember how excited we would get talking about new ideas and philosophy and ourselves. And at the idea that we might be still best friends ten years in the future! It was... whew. The primary relationship of my life at that point and then some. Everything was influenced and revolved around it. Eventually, her relationship with a mutual friend became an exacerbating factor in the various ways it tested both of our loyalties.
Things developed through college. My best friend for ten years was a woman I had roomed with for roughly four months. For the rest of our friendship we were in constant electronic contact and we visited each other a few times a year, but she was very rarely in the thick of my day to day. It was quintessentially unphysical and incredibly cerebral. Like having another personality in my head that i communicated with via daily trips to the computer lab.
I spent far more time and sought more comfort with a variety of other friends through that time. As my sixth grade friendship foretold, there were scads of complex relationships impervious to definition and constantly evolving. My ex and dear friend at SJC was one of two incredibly intimate friends for the duration of my SJC career, my second roommate and I shared a hyper connected energy that frankly terrified all our other friends, my near-husband who was just a friend goddamnit, my first couple of dance partners, my partner in crime at the dance studio, work spouses, and a variety of other highly tight but often more complicated and sometimes more fraught relationships during that time.They all in their way had a greater impact and level of support.
But with my 10 year best friend, there was a sense of overarching enduring intertwining. This despite the fact that we were ultimately polar opposites in key areas that reflects far more the differences I find in marriage and relationships. Often a mutual sense that it was the two of us against the world and nobody else really understood each other quite like we did, though simultaneously she was a doggedly stubborn and rational person while I was mercurial and a "feeler" as she'd disdainfully label it before saying "but you're ok." There were elements of courtship and markers of distance that makes me appreciate how rich and complex friendships can be. And insecurities and jealousies that took a strain.
Since then, my friendships have always been more flexible. The ties more elastic. The connection more quickly fond and appreciative, but less tinged with semi-romantic elements of commitment and exclusivity.
After that last best-friendship ended, my Best Friend category slowly eroded. The categorization was increasingly casual and descriptive, though the feelings remained burstingly affectionate. I guess you could say that my best-friendedness got a little polyamorous. And then it was just all a big flood of fond and very little particular clarity or commitment beyond really wanting to connect when it was possible.
I learned from the quick roulette intense connectivity of dance how to invest all of oneself in a present connection and then easily slip into the next without feeling a self lost. Both in erotic/sensual and cerebral ways. It taught me to drink in the energies of people around me and reinvest them in my relationships.
Not to say there won't always be a just-the-right person for certain occasions. And a just-the-right-person-for-way-more occasions probably. And it'll ebb and flow and come and go. These things I also learned. They apply in all relationships even when some make a deeper stamp. The marriage one is the one where these don't fully apply because of conscious choices, commitments and life-building exercises that require the commitments and choices in order to sustain. These in turn facilitate and require that primary attachment. But there's still a recognition that nobody purely gets needs met from a single other person.
I'm almost amazed that 70% of my generation reports having a best friend though I get that the term may be more of a plural "one of my best friends" kind of deal. I do still use bestie like an elevated term for buddy - though I prefer "close friend" or "dear friend" to denote an extra gold star in the increasingly amorphous land of friendship (which in itself gets so much squishier with the permanence of social media).
Best Friend. I wonder why sometimes I clung to that status so fiercely, but it feels like it emerged in a world of dualities that were perhaps helpful orienting in an adult landscape of attachment.
There was self and other and I craved a deep connection with both. I think I sought a completion with an echo of myself and all that I was expected to be with one true best friend who fully understood me. And I longed to be consumed by the othernes of a romantic/erotic draw, drawing those full tensions and contrasts. One without the other had a vague threat of complete consumption. As if they needed to exist in balance.A sea of friendship and undefined everything else beneath over which these connected as a bridge.
So there we are, I guess.That I don't have and don't expect to have a one true best friend is something that sort of settled with me since Chaya was born. I do sometime miss feeling like I had one person I could tell anything to the same way I sometimes miss being able to just sit on the floor and sob for mommy when my buttons don't button right or I just woke up grumpy. There are times there's something I want to talk out and I simply don't know who to go to. I guess that's what shrinks and blogs are for! Mostly shrinks. There's actually stuff I won't write about, believe it or not!
Nonetheless, attachment grows and endures. And perhaps a recognition of the loneliness of being adds its own sapor to the connections that we make and lose. We're born with templates and metaphors and we follow them literally until they outlive their usefulness. Hopefully the lessons learned in the meantime are sustaining and liberating. Hopefully Chaya's models are valuable and she knows when to let go of them. Hopefully some of these darned preschool parents actually know how to return a smile and like to occasionally make snarky comments with other similarly preschool parents and/or give out brithday party invitations... maybe they too can be bestiesh in time! Or just acquaintances. I hear those are a good thing to have too!
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