Who better to fall in love with than a best friend?
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, has done it – and I can understand precisely why
Fifteen years ago, when my best friend was separating from her other half, he accused her of having a lesbian affair with me. We were startled, then chuffed by the notion. The two of us already shared hinterland, humour and a wide circle of acquaintances. We adored each other’s children, went on holiday together and could pretty much read each another’s minds. Falling in love would have been perfect.
Who else could have fitted so seamlessly into my life? Even my husband thought it was a brilliant wheeze, meaning he could decamp to a remote Scottish croft, spending the rest of his days leafing through books about dreadnoughts. However, there was one major flaw with the proposition: neither I, nor my bestie, was the least bit inclined towards same-sex passion. But in the following years we have often finished our correspondence with the declaration: “I love you, will you marry me?” If all else fails, we could live our twilight years in a cottage in Dorset reading novels, cackling and drinking gin.
So when Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat Pray Love, announced this week that she’s left her husband for her best friend (the hair stylist and ex-junkie Rayya Elias), I had sympathy for her change of tack. Gilbert is in her late forties, as I am, a time of life when both your hormones and priorities start to change. Surely it would be easier to go through the menopause with a woman who’s sharing the indignities of hot flushes, night sweats and mood swings?
A formerly heterosexual friend, who started dating a woman aged 48, told me how fantastic it was to share a wardrobe and split the cost of a flash new leather coat. She also pointed out the while older men get ever harder to eject from an armchair, middle-aged women are up for tango classes and backpacking round India.
Gilbert says she discovered her true feelings for Rayya when the latter was diagnosed with incurable cancer. “In that space of stark and utter realness, I was face to face with this truth. I do not merely love Rayya; I am in love with Rayya.” This sexual fluidity, discovered at a time of midlife flux, is increasingly common among women.
Susan Sontag was married to Philip Rieff in her youth, but went on to have a long partnership with the photographer Annie Leibovitz. Mary Portas was married to a man, before meeting her fashion editor wife, Melanie Rickey; while psychoanalyst Susie Orbach spent 30 years with the writer Joseph Schwartz, before falling for Jeanette Winterson. Orbach wrote on Friday that Gilbert’s story “resonates, because we are finally beginning to realise that sexuality is neither a binary nor fixed”.
It’s certainly true that many people of both genders experience close friendship with members of the same sex as a heady, near-erotic form of intimacy. Hence expressions like “bosom friend”, “schoolgirl pash” or the more recent “bromance”.
None of my sexual relationships at university were anything like as fervent as the passion I had for my closest friend, to the point people were surprised to see us out separately. And I observed that many of my male contemporaries (especially those from boarding schools) were far more enamoured with male chums than they were with girlfriends.
In later life, a man’s preference for this brand of intimate male company can express itself through membership of an old-fashioned members’ club, visits to Lord’s or Stamford Bridge, or hours spent sidling up to strangers in a vinyl shop and sharing the quest for a rare Stones album (although little is more incriminating than the cycling weekend with the best mate clad in tight Lycra).
One is reminded of Professor Higgins’s lament to BF Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Or of Sherlock Holmes’s domestic camaraderie with Dr Watson. Or of every cynical male detective teamed with an eager young recruit, where the readiness to take a bullet for the other outclasses any romance with a woman. We laugh knowingly at these scenarios because it seems so utterly plausible that a British man’s fiercest loyalty is for his pal.
If the love between straight men isn’t a new phenomenon, neither is the close attachment of one apparently heterosexual woman to another – an ability to live in warm proximity that was once covered by the expressive term “companion”. Several retired teachers from my old school ended up living in cottages with another colleague, just as the divorced writer Muriel Spark ended her days living with the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine.
Those who try to infer covert sexual preference are generally misguided: it’s about tracking down fine company, not fondling. The history of such inter-dependent friendship long precedes the past century. I was fascinated to learn via Joanne Limburg’s fine novel about Queen Anne, A Want of Kindness, that it was fashionable in court circles in the 17th century to write to your best friend as you would to a male lover. Thus the supposedly stolid Anne sighed to her beloved Lady Churchill in 1686: “I am truly yours and can never be perfectly happy without the continuation of your kindness, which I earnestly beg.”
If Elizabeth Gilbert has found that kind of requited tenderness with Elias, who would begrudge them their happiness?