Many Love

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

  We drove a few miles to an anonymous trash can to get rid of the condom. There were trash cans at the trailhead where we’d parked, but we had the idea that if we threw the condom away there, it could ultimately be traced back to us. A few months later, we drove back to the trailhead, and Ben gave me a delicate gold-chained necklace with a seed-shaped diamond (yes, a real diamond). He was a great boyfriend.

  I wish I could say that the ignominy of leaving Eli faded over time. It did not. In fact, it only swelled and grew more shameful by the day, and I didn’t know how to contain it. To make matters worse, Jessica was not pleased with me at all. By the time I started dating Ben, she had found a boyfriend—an Israeli musician at our school. Jessica’s having a boyfriend, however, did not magically repair our friendship. She’d been cold with me since I’d started dating Ben. Now that I was with him, Ben was around all the time. I couldn’t understand why this would bother Jessica. Ben was a great guy! He just hadn’t been her type.

  We did all go to prom together—Jessica, Jessica’s new boyfriend, Ben, and me. We ate dinner at a salty Greek restaurant in Chinatown; Jessica’s boyfriend had been there before and knew to order this chewy white cheese that the waiters set on fire tableside before serving it to you. Prom was on a boat. Jessica said, “I wish they could have prom on a cloud. I mean, a boat’s fine, but a cloud would really be something.”

  At one point, Jessica grabbed my elbow while “Hey-Ya” was playing and pulled me into a narrow hallway. “You have to see Shelly Mock’s makeup,” she told me. Shelly, my longtime nemesis, had gone to prom with her cousin, so she was probably already having a shitty night. I peeked out at the dance floor to see her under a black light, her foundation glowing a pale green. “Forget about shaking it like a Polaroid picture,” Jessica whispered. “Shelly’s in a full-on darkroom.

  Jessica was funnier than anyone I knew—much funnier than any boy I’d ever met. As we began to spend less time together, I noticed that I didn’t laugh as much. This, I supposed, was a sacrifice one made in the name of love.

  Ben and I applied to all the same colleges. We both got scholarships at a small liberal arts school in Walla Walla, where the students had been ranked “happiest” for the past five years by the Princeton Review. Jessica’s dad said she had to go to a state school.

  The last day I spent with Jessica before leaving for college, we went out for breakfast. “It’s fine if Ben comes, right?” I’d asked. We went to a sleepy all-night diner called the Golden Touch Family Restaurant. It had vinyl-covered booths the color of avocado skin and shiny checkered tables, and waitresses with big feathery curls and gemstone makeup. They served everything on big glass platters from the 1970s and always brought out way too many tiny paper cups with balls of rubbery margarine. That was also the day Jessica’s boyfriend broke up with her, because he was going to school in California and didn’t think it made sense to try to date long distance. Over half a grapefruit and a plate of chocolate-chip pancakes, Jessica cried. I put my hand on her shoulder and asked, “Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”

  She looked up. Her face was as sober as a stone.

  And for the record, Ben did. Ben was a good boyfriend.

  It took me decades to realize what Jessica had known from the beginning: I had constructed an impossible box to live inside. The box could accommodate only two people, a man and a woman, and even then, it couldn’t accommodate full versions of them. I picked the things from my mom’s marriage that looked good—the house, the kids, the photo albums filled with shots of trips to Europe and anniversary dinners—and discarded anything remotely off-color. I understood that this was a challenge: I would have my mom’s marriage, only better and healthier. I would have my mom’s life, only fuller and richer, because I would have selected exactly the right man to shove into my tiny box life. There was no space for female friendship (who needed female friends? My mom didn’t seem to have any), and there was no space for ambition outside the box (job schmob, dreams schmeams; a good husband would trump all of those). By the time I realized how unattainable this was—five boyfriends later—the damage to my female friendships had scarred over, and there was no going back.

  The ideas I had about love—for instance, that pure and true romantic love was the only love that really mattered—were not unusual; it wasn’t like my mom and I sat in a dark cave espousing some kind of cultlike ideology about marriage. When I was growing up, those ideas were everywhere. The years between 1996 and 2008—my formative ones—were the highest-grossing box office years for romantic comedies in history.8 The top five performing rom-com feature films came out before I was old enough to be legally married.

  I formed my ideas about love based on this version of relationships: meet, fall in love, get married (a white dress and a big ring are, importantly, involved in this step), maybe have a kid or two, and live happily ever after. But relationships have been changing. Over the past decade, more and more people have been raising children without being married or having a partner, and more and more women have decided not to have children at all.9

  It extends to teenagers, too, in case you haven’t noticed. The overarching trend in teen dating is this: teens today are doing less of it. In 2002, just 34.4 percent of tenth-graders reported that they “never date”; in 2013, that number had jumped up to 44 percent. It’s possible that the definition of the word “date” is different than the definition of the term “hook up”; that social media has awakened more young people to the dangers of sex and dating; or that the kids of today are enjoying what Amy Davidson of The New Yorker calls “the extension of childhood.”10 In any case, I would be remiss not to state that there is a very real possibility that today’s girls are less interested in being a girlfriend than I ever was.

  And for the record, even my mom’s ideas about love have changed. When I told her I was writing a book about polyamory, she was encouraging. Over ramen last Christmas, she began schooling me about the nomenclature of love.

  I only recently started to consider the notion that I might not really know that much about her marriage. Forty-eight years is a long time to be in one relationship. My parents are both pretty mum about whether they’ve always been 100 percent technically monogamous. People do all kinds of things to make their relationships work, and a lot of it usually goes unspoken. Love is a sacrifice regardless of the form it takes. I don’t know all the details of my parents’ marriage, but I do know that they decided to stick it out with each other, and that when something awful happens—when a person in their lives gets sick or dies or hurts them—they don’t have to face it alone. My dad makes scrambled eggs or pancakes on Sunday mornings, and they sit with a pair of pencils over the New York Times crossword puzzle and work through it with a calculated methodology that belongs only to them.

  In the past decade, though, my mother has drastically changed her tune about the relationships in my life. Lately, she’s been very careful to tell me that “It’s okay if you don’t want to get married. People don’t have to get married anymore.” She’s happy in her marriage, and her marriage has lasted almost fifty years. And no matter what path I take—no matter how I ultimately choose to love—I’ll still wonder what would have happened had I done it differently. My daughter (I hope I have a daughter) will, I imagine, wonder if there is yet another way to love.

  Now, when I watch the birds outside my window (where I dangle my bird feeders, my binoculars always within reach), I picture them nesting on a tall branch far away, loving each other and raising their young together, and having sexual rendezvous with the neighbors when things are calm enough. Birds probably don’t do that, either; birds operate in ways that humans will never be able to understand, which is part of what I love so much about them.

  But before I’d found any of this peace of mind having to do with love or birds or my parents or happily-ever-after, I had entered stage two of Project Perfect Boyfriend, and we were college bound. I was afraid to go to college. I woke up almost every
night from awful dreams in which my classmates were shiny green aliens who couldn’t understand the way I talked. Ben’s parents had grown to really like me; his mom called one day to tell me she thought Ben would flounder if he didn’t get some “cooler clothes” for college, and if she gave me some money, would I take him shopping? I thought this was a great idea; I wanted my college boyfriend to at least appear somewhat put-together.

  Months in advance, we were mailed our roommate assignments. I had been put with a girl whose French manicure was visible in her photograph, and whose cheeks were polished, apparently, with the dew from angels’ wings. If this was what I was up against in college, I was doomed. Before we left in separate cars to begin our young adult lives, Ben bought a $50 pair of (nonpleated) jeans, and I had my hair dyed blond and cut like Mandy Moore’s. (At least, I brought Mandy Moore’s picture in to the stylist; no one ever told me I even remotely resembled her after the fact.)

  I figured that this time around, I would be the kind of girlfriend I always knew I could be.

  PART 2

  “Just” “Friends”

  My mom wouldn’t let me buy “Best Friends” jewelry. This was a major blow. Claire’s sold such a lavish array of broken-heart pieces, matching pandas, and rhinestone-embedded word splices, and having “Best Friends” jewelry was essential to a person’s popularity. At the mall, I would run my fingers longingly across the matching-set jewelry. It didn’t even matter who had the other half of the necklace—having one indicated something very important to the rest of the world: that you were someone’s favorite.

  This was exactly my mother’s objection. “No one really has just one best friend,” she told me. “To pretend you do is to play a favorites game that leaves other people out.”

  “In the hierarchy of relationships,” writes Julie Beck for The Atlantic, “friendships are at the bottom.”1 This is reflected everywhere from my mom’s taste in jewelry to the little data available on the subject: while relationship science is rich, it tends to focus on the romantic definition of the word “relationship” and never (seriously—never) the platonic one. Popular media is also myopically focused on romantic love: movies about relationships almost unanimously center on romance; popular music about friendship essentially begins and ends with Randy Newman;2 even the pivotal television show about what it means to be Friends deteriorates into a meditation on who’s sleeping with whom, and ultimately dissolves as soon as the once-unhappy singles are happily coupled off.

  It wasn’t always this way. Aristotle, for one, disagreed, explaining that philia (often translated to “brotherly love,” or, for our purposes, nonromantic love) is one of the highest forms of love. (Love, for those who skipped Plato’s Symposium, was literally a godlike “great spirit” to the Ancient Greeks.)3 He examines the three types of friendship in book VIII of Nicomachean Ethics: friendship based on utility (like when your boss invites you out for drinks, and you kind of have to get along because you both need each other), friendship based on pleasure (like when you have a one-night stand with the hot barista because she thinks you’re hot, too), and then that really good sort of friendship that practically defies explanation. Aristotle describes this as a “complete sort of friendship between people who are good and alike in virtue.” It comes from being good, finding someone else who is good, and loving, unsuperficially, the goodness in each other.

  There are also plenty of what have been called “romantic friendships” in Victorian literature. Extremely intimate but nonsexual relationships between friends—sometimes involving holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, or sharing a bed—are rife in the pages of books and letters by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Jane Austen. William Shakespeare ambiguously addressed 126 of his love sonnets to an adolescent boy,4 which signified either his bisexuality or a deeply intense male friendship. The relationship might actually have fallen somewhere in the middle. Between the platonic and the sexual is a natural but ambiguous type of love between friends that seems to make contemporary Western societies uncomfortable. Today, the idea of a woman spending the night in the same bed with her best female friend and holding her close to her body—and maybe kissing her good night—is so strange that we can’t hear about it without assuming something sexual (or at least kind of weird) is going on. For Brontë and Austen, such a physical female friendship was par for the course.

  The general consensus about why friendship dies as we age is this: over time, life gets busier, people build families, and friends move away. The largest drop-off in friendship unsurprisingly tends to happen when people get married. Maybe it’s because everyone (at least according to my Facebook feed) is always marrying their “best friends.”

  I don’t get this. No matter how great the person is who’s on your joint insurance plan—no matter how many things you share, how much you can laugh together, and how many shows Netflix designates as “couples’ shows” for you—no one can be everything for anyone. That’s a bitter pill to swallow. For years I drank all the Soul Mate Kool-Aid I could get my hands on; it’s certainly seductive to believe that someone out there is made specifically for you.

  I started to change my mind about that when Ben and I broke up. This happened on a Tuesday during our freshman year of college, while we sat in a park by a duck pond that smelled vaguely like sulfur. There had been a slow build to it. We lived in different residence halls, and there were way more cute boys in my residence hall than I thought there would be, and while I really loved Ben, I also really, really wanted to kiss the new cute boys. I didn’t phrase it exactly that way when I broke up with him, though. The for-Ben version went something like: “We have to focus on our studies! And meet new people and do things! And not be distracted! But we’re going to be friends forever, I promise, and this is ultimately going to be good, and we’ll probably get back together really soon.” Ben wasn’t horrified, but he was cautious. Um, didn’t I think that we belonged together? he wanted to know. Of course we belong together! I assured him.

  This breakup was not all that dramatic, and, surprisingly, we did stay friends. Ben took me to buy lemon cake and get a tattoo when I went through a breakup with my next boyfriend. We moved in together during our junior year, and I brought home people I wanted to sleep with, and he brought home people he wanted to sleep with. I’m sure there were moments early on when we were both jealous, but my memories of college are filled with late nights playing Super Smash Brothers in the living room, afternoons DJing at the college radio station, and making experimental chocolate-cherry cupcakes, and doing all of it with Ben.

  I know that having this kind of friendship with an ex is uncommon. Friendships with exes, if attempted at all, often fail.5 And while staying friendly with an ex isn’t especially rare (as in, you don’t make voodoo dolls or anything, and you hug each other if you both have to go to a mutual friend’s wedding), dubbing an ex your bestie is all but unheard-of.

  According to social scientists, there are a few indicators that your failed romantic relationship might transition into a successful platonic one. If a relationship ends on a positive, amicable note, for example, your chances of staying friends are significantly higher.6 A longstanding friendship preceding a romantic relationship—as Ben and I had in high school—also bodes well.7 But what matters the most is how invested, committed, and satisfied each person in a romantic relationship is. The more a person is happy with her partner—the more she says she cares—the more likely it is that she’ll maintain a healthy friendship with that partner after the romantic relationship has ended. I know—this totally goes against that whole “If we’re not passionately fighting all the time, the fire just isn’t there” stereotype you may have grown up believing. In truth, there are some ways in which relationships don’t change all that much after the people in them stop kissing each other. Real love isn’t easy to stamp out; you hold on to your affection even after you stop wanting to have sex.

  After we graduated, Ben moved back to Portland, into a fratty house with
a bunch of dudes. The house contained no fewer than nine video game consoles; the sink was always teeming with wet pizza crusts and plastic plates caked in crusted-over macaroni and cheese; and the sofa smelled like weed in a way that would never come out. I moved to New Orleans to be a teacher. Ben’s parents, whom I remained close with, approved of my decision—they even took me out for Thai food. For a while, Ben was an unhappy actuary (which is perhaps redundant). I hated teaching. When I visited over Christmas, we sat across a slice of fudge cake at a diner as the tinny ceiling speakers wheezed out “Ave Maria” on the radio. We were both sadder than we knew how to explain. We sat in silence, Ben pushing a lump of cake around the plate with his fork, me drawing circles in ballpoint pen on a crumpled paper napkin.

  And then, only a few weeks after that, Ben met Jen. Jen was young (she was eighteen, he was twenty-four), but she didn’t seem young. They went on a few dates. For a while, Jen—who lived an hour or so away—drove to Portland, and they sat in Ben’s living room and did jigsaw puzzles while it rained outside. They started dating more regularly. They fell in love. They moved together to Austin, where they adopted two cats and then a dog. They moved into a house that had a yard, and after Jen had to have hip surgery (twice), they decided there was no way they could live without each other.