I grew up close to my sister. We are only one year apart. She was my first friend and since that early beginning we never left each other. With her, I learned of friendship as sisterhood and most of my life I nurtured close connections with women. For a long time I kept men at a distance. I dreamt about men, invented versions of them I fell in love with, but only crossed the real space between my soul and another soul with girlfriends: my sister, other women who became versions of a sister. We had the effortless intimacy of not having to be attractive, not needing to impress each other, not being mortified. Once, in elementary school, while talking, I saw bubbles of my saliva land in my friend’s face. She saw them too. We made a joke about tiny UFOs invading a human head. There was no embarrassment, we laughed until we couldn’t breathe. As I got older, friendship continued to be mostly a feminine space where I could display with honesty all my imperfection and laugh about it.
It took me longer than most people to stop falling in love with versions of men dreamed at a distance, and sink into the gritty affair of loving a real person instead, and be loved by him. But I eventually fell in love, got married, and after 13 years saw my marriage dissolve. I learned to be close to men and more of them are my friends now. Our friendships are not quite as unselfconscious as my friendships with women, they have a distinct tension. They are strong connections that happen to be placed outside of romance. I wonder about all the barely noticeable alchemies that situated us as friends, instead of romantic partners. There is, first, the mystifying accident of physical attraction -a sum of infinitesimal codes set by hormones and smell and taste and the wiring of the body, memory, subconscious, old and new dreams - that is either there, or not at all. Sometimes there is the distance imposed by an existing line, when they already have a partner, or I do. Sometimes there is an insurmountable age gap. Sometimes there is a geography limit, a distance measured in kilometers.
But sometimes even if there is a physical connection as much as a spiritual one, and no space or time obstacles to surmount, friendship blooms in a place where all the ingredients would have just as well sustained romance. Or we get stuck in a space where there is attraction and intimacy, but not enough momentum for a more serious romantic relationship. Which is less a question of why friendship wins and more of a question of why romantic love fails to get going. Which is really a question of why love happens sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t, even between people suited for each other. Which is really a question of how love happens at all.
Many precise conditions need to come together before it starts to rain: the wind’s speed, the humidity, the temperature, the clouds’ shape. I wonder if love is also a form of precipitation condensing out of precise, unpredictable, conditions. In my case, falling in love was the consequence of a series of moments composed as music, or brief paintings in time. They left a vivid impression on me and I can still picture them in all their clarity:
Toño (who I loved from afar, as a dream, in High School) was walking on the street, next to the traffic. We were wearing halloween costumes. I was a bird. He was a madman, with disheveled hair and black lipstick and a straight jacket, looking like he just escaped from a mental hospital. He began shouting to the cars going by: I'm a madman! I'm a madman! I’m a madman! I thought I had never seen anyone be so self assured and free.
He was licking a blue lollipop and showed me his tongue, asking if it was blue (it was). He walked next to me, and I liked the proximity of his very tall body.
Years later, Jason, the man I eventually married, stopped his march across the grocery store where we both worked, and explained to me the way the night sky looks outside the city, and all those stars, together at once. He described that starry night with the wonderment of a kid. I couldn’t believe such innocence was possible. I fell in love for good when I learned his life had been unsheltered, and ruthless, and I understood his innocence wasn’t just a trait but a quiet victory, like the smile of a battered boxer as he gets up for the next round. There were two images: the real moment of him explaining the stars, and the image I created of him as a battered boxer who smiles before the next round. Both pictures opened my heart for all of love’s beginnings.
I wonder if love always starts that way and we need a moment illuminating someone under an extraordinary light. And what if the moment happens and we weren’t paying attention. What if the opposite happens: we see someone under a light that disappoints us, and rules them out romantically. Maybe both the extraordinary and the disappointing moments are distortions invented by our fear or our hunger to be close. Or maybe all of it is a precise and accidental combination of temperature and atmospheric pressures, similar to the chemical system that attracts us to someone, or not. Or maybe (maybe), love is not always a sudden strike, but can be a revelation after a patient wait, a blurry picture slowly coming into focus; the sum of a thousand moments instead of a single one, like water finally overflowing its container after a slow, steady drip.
We think of our hearts as searching devices, and of love as the consequence of a successful search, landing in a soulmate. But our hearts make mistakes. For some, their heart is a well calibrated compass. When in doubt, they can ask their heart what to do, and their heart will answer with the truth. But for others, the heart learned along the way a pattern out of hurt, or fear, and the needle keeps pointing to wrong people, again and again. Or sometimes, we want love so much we keep jumping at its faintest possibility, and love becomes an invention we project on others, not the result of a connection, but the superimposed idea of one.
Romantic love fascinates me, and I don't understand it. It is (or so it seems) accidental, even when we approach it as a decision. Before we decide to love someone, something ineffable happens in our hearts. Love is the consequence of a thousand ways two people are similar, and a thousand ways two people are different, just enough so they can become pieces in a new puzzle- each indented corner matching a protrusion- and just enough so the picture of that puzzle is compelling. I may like a man enormously. We may understand each other deeply. And yet, we may be both passive in the specific corners of our souls where one of us needs to be assertive, so it turns out the pieces are there, the colours are similar, but the picture never sets.
I want life, the world, people, to leave their prints on me as profoundly as possible. I want to be touched, and moved. I want, by the time I die, to have a skin, a spirit, criss-crossed with many marks. I want to say: I was here, the world was here with me, I loved people, they were here with me, look, this is how they changed me. I always thought of romantic love as one of the most intense and sure-fire ways to let a human engagement touch, move, change and mark me forever. It probably is. But my friends are changing me too, all the time. They have an expansive influence and charge dormant parts of me aching to wake up. And we care for each other, just because we do. Not because we can promise sex, or the euphoric ecstasy of romance and the everyday tenderness lovers promise to each other. We cannot promise anything except solidarity (and laughter) for all our lives’ questions and labour.
Romantic love is more mysterious and fluctuating. It is more risky and maybe it demands more courage from us. But because it is born like rainfall, out of a precise chain of atmospheric pressures and changes in the wind’s speed and temperature, it can end as mysteriously as it starts. Friendship is more predictable and steady. It is less intense, but not less beautiful. What it lacks in excitement and ferocity it gives back in agency, and kindness. One can fall out of love. It is much harder to fall out of friendship. We cannot conjure romantic love, just keep ourselves open to its possibility. But when we find a connection to another person, we can cultivate it in friendship, like a garden which starts small and gets richer, more varied, as it grows, and will stay alive as long as we remember to take care of it.
Arturo is a dear friend I saw recently in Mexico City. He is a talented gardener of friendships. He has been friends since he was a teenager with a woman almost 30 years older than him. They met in a political group. They've lived in different cities for decades. To this day, they keep sending each other WhatsApp messages. Some of them are just the recording of her laughter responding to a joke or a funny comment from Arturo. He played the recording for me. It is one of those magical laughs that is born deep in the belly, and seems to shake the entire body. She imparts the wisdom of her age, advises Arturo to try everything, at least once.
Friendship is not a consolation prize for a man and a woman who couldn’t manage to connect romantically. It is in its own right a luminous, clean, form of love. We get to nurture and understand each other. We get to be ourselves. We get to be generous without demands, without hunger. It opens a bridge between our soul and another soul just as truthful as the bridge between lovers.
I often tell my friends about the romantic start of my parents' relationship. They have several stories, all of them poetic. I particularly like this one: they were dating as university students, and climbed a mountain to plant a tree together. Shortly after, they took a break during which they decided not to see or talk to each other. They had no contact at all, for several weeks. During that break, my mom climbed the mountain, found the tree, and tied a red ribbon around it. Later, when she saw my dad again, he had the ribbon tied around his ankle.
After 25 years of marriage my parents separated, and for a long time that separation was absolute. I had to distribute my family visits between my mom and my dad, making sure to spend the same amount of days with each of them.
Then, my mom got seriously sick, and my dad returned home to take care of her. Not as a lover or a romantic partner. As a friend. And out of all their love stories, this is by far the best one.
