Female friendships hold the truest meaning of love
The author, pictured with her group of friends.
When I had my first heartbreak at 19, I didn’t know what to do with myself. More accurately, I didn’t know what to do with the pain. It was typical young love—we started college together, and as these stories sometimes go, by the end of it all, we had grown apart. My understandings of love, informed by novels and ballads, were limited to conceptions of joy and happiness and light. I was confused. No one ever told me that love evoked pain, or perhaps a better phrasing here is, I never took heed of the pain. Then again, I never understood love.
In All About Love, bell hooks writes, “To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us.”
My conceptions of the word ‘love’ were informed, in early adolescence, through an enculturation project that valorized and romanticized a certain type of love; a heteronormative, transgressive and futile love. Which is to say, my conception of love began to grow in step with my own personal reckoning and development. I didn’t want to be rescued, I wanted to be seen. It is a painful bloom, confronting the realities of the world, for they are not what they can be, but nevertheless I began to love love once I began to love me.
“I didn’t want to be rescued, I wanted to be seen.”
When I had my first heartbreak and the world felt like it was ending again and again and again, it was women who loved me. I remember sitting on the floor of my college dorm at 2 am crying inconsolably. I had just lost my bedroom sheets to a dry cleaning accident and I had nowhere else to sleep. Tired and mourning my heart, I clung to the phone cradled in my right arm, as my sister gently consoled me from miles and miles away. I returned her words with loud shattering heaves. My heart was broken and the simplest tasks felt all the more difficult.
Image supplied by author.
I heard a knock on the door and watched as one by one my friends walked in carrying snacks and treats, a blanket, new sheets, and a pillow. They made my bed and sat on the ground with me, holding together the world I was mourning in defiance.
I spent the next weeks walking hand in hand with friends down College Walk. I would cry on the shoulder of another as she braided my hair. I would eat cookies till dawn, cackling and giggling at our misfortune, and I would smile understanding and believing in the world we loved, a world that was tender, generous and kind. My relationships with women have expanded and informed my worldview of survival and freedom, extraordinarily so, amidst catastrophe.
It was Audre Lorde who would write in Sister Outsider, “The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival."
As I’ve grown older, my friendships have become markers to the type of love I believe in. It is through them that I have learned to define love as a care that we are all entitled to. Love that is fearsome as it is sweet. Love that is honest as it is bold. Friends who share songs that remind them of you. Friends who take pictures of the moon from millions of miles away to say hi. Friends who will mourn loss, plant gardens and dream of new beginnings. I have had some of the most romantic friendships I ever will get to see and I am honored to bear witness to that reality. As a result, my friendships have expanded my worldview of romance and intimacy in the most beautiful of ways.
“My relationships with women have expanded and informed my worldview of survival and freedom, extraordinarily so, amidst catastrophe.”
bell hooks ends that earlier quote by saying, “True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.” Like hooks said, in many ways, love is indeed redemptive. But I have had to actively redefine my definition of love to understand the question. Redeemed by whom? By defining love as care, I see it for what it is: a liberating and revolutionary force amidst pain, amidst joy, amidst vulnerability. In turn, I recognize that love is everywhere. This, of course, is a long-winded way of saying that I now dream of a world where the love I have for my friends and the love they have shared with me is the greatest liberatory force of all.