Celebrate Valentine’s Day the Radical Way—With Friends

Friendship may be a more powerful subversive relationship than your average romance.

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Complex Original

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Last Valentine’s Day I sat on a bench at a gallery and listened to a really attractive artist read an erotic excerpt from a then unreleased book about a teenage girl who, at this point in the story, is pining after Mike B., a notorious “Professional Devirginizer.” I sat on the bench with my friend. Both of us were single, miserably so, but we were beyond the point in our lives where we’d rationalize our loneliness by reducing February 14 to just another product of capitalism, a Hallmark holiday, a lackluster excuse to tell the person you love, I love you. No. This was 2015. We didn’t want to be acerbic and cynical. So we put on our coats, left our walk-ups, and chose to spend the entire day together, culminating with that evening reading at the SoHo clothing store and gallery American Two Shot.

I’d forgotten about the night until a few weeks ago, when I attended a Q&A with the author of a book I really enjoyed from 2015 (it’s called A Little Life, if you’re interested). At some point, the author, Hanya Yanagihara, spoke about friendship, revealing that she borrowed the intimate bond shared by the four male protagonists in her novel from her own life. She spoke about her day to day, how she, along with her close friends, are all in a similar place in life: 40-something, single, and career-minded. She doesn’t see this as a drawback, however, and instead made a simple, but powerful observation about these relationships. To paraphrase, friendships are the only personal relationships we have that aren’t bound by any sort of heavy societal obligation—sex, blood, or law. We all have people we hold onto from the past—a family friend, someone from high school who also hated AP Chemistry with you—but at some point in your life, the defining quality of the friendships in your life is that you want to be around these people.

friendships are the only personal relationships we have that aren’t bound by any sort of heavy societal obligation—sex, blood, or law.

In an article published late last year in The Atlantic, William Rawlins, the Stocker Professor of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio University, put it best: A friendship is “the freedom to be independent and the freedom to be dependent.” It’s not necessarily the most stable or consistent dynamic, but it’s perhaps the only kind of relationship where you have something resembling total agency.

It’s something easy to forget, especially for people in their early 20s (i.e., me) who tend to prioritize romance and sex over everything else. Back in Victorian times—or at least as depicted in some of my favorite novels and plays—marriage was rarely romantic. Instead, it was an institution with clear and cold goals, especially for women. There was the dowry, expectations about financial care, and children. Without it you were an outcast, and so much of the art from this period depicts marriage as the ultimate preoccupation—for the most part. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest massacres these conventions, and we see in his works (and in Charles Dickens’ novels and even in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) that friendships are oftentimes the purest (and superior) form of companionship—real love. While there is frequent anxiety about marriage and all that accompanies it, the strongest relationships are those shared by friends. There’s Pip and Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre’s short-lived friendship with Helen in boarding school is among the most intimate in Brontë​'s novel.

I met my friend Lara freshman year during Hurricane Sandy. She lived in the same dorm as some mutual friends, and after their dorm lost power, she came with them to mine. We didn’t get close right away, but near the end of my freshman year at NYU, we began taking Sunday walks together to talk and explore different downtown Manhattan neighborhoods.

On Valentine's Day last year, Lara and I ate together, something that's important to our relationship. But it’s the reading that remains the most vivid in my mind, particularly the last reader, who read Amazon reviews of sex toys. In those few hours I’ve rarely been so relaxed about not having a romantic companion—either on Valentine’s Day or in general.

Still, it wasn’t until the evening of the Yanagihara Q&A that I grasped the potential friendships have for determining our day-to-day happiness.

I do believe there’s something inherently subversive about friendships that is a characteristic more Often Attributed to queer relationships.

When I came out as queer a few years back I knew I wasn’t at risk of being isolated or abandoned by my parents, siblings, or even extended relatives. Still, I was aware of the narrative that so many queer youth grapple with, and then, hopefully, embrace—that you make your own family. You challenge the cliché that blood is thicker than water. You self-create, take pride in your ability to manipulate all that we were taught was sacred, and turn those things on their head. Your friends become your family.

To some extent this applies to me. Even with a family I love back home, I came to college and forged relationships with people who share my politics, aspects of my identity, and, most significantly, with people who made me feel good about myself.

I don’t mean to necessarily “queer” friendships, mostly because I don’t think I’m in the position to point my finger and say, “This is queer, this is not queer.”  But I do believe there’s something inherently subversive about friendship that is a characteristic more often attributed to queer relationships—the ability to exist on your terms, removed from any stable institution. The choice part is the most essential—radical, even.

I have a handful of close friends today. Friends I make based on a shared emotional experience, on taste, on the fact that we had a class together and just got along immediately. But, at least today, they are all relationships I formed based on a conscious choice. I think it’s why this Valentine’s Day, like my last, I want to make an active effort to love my friends, give myself a break from all the anxiety I feel about my romantic and sexual relationships, and give attention to the people who have been there for me in ways that other people just can’t.

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