SHE WHO OUTRANKS MY BOYFRIEND
Jes Brodie on how a renegade relationship has brought her domestic bliss
Last year, when my family sat down to Christmas dinner and we went around the table saying what we are most grateful for, I didn’t have to think hard. The thing I’m most grateful for is my partner. The only hiccup with that is that my partner is not my boyfriend. My boyfriend is wonderful, but my partner, well, she is magnificent.
We have lived together for the past two years, and we have been friends for more than a decade. We have a rich and meaningful life, which includes a beautiful house, three dogs, and a shared account. We are not a sexual partnership, but our relationship doesn’t feel strictly platonic either. It’s tempting to analogise this kind of relationship, and it’s true it does traverse a varied landscape, travelling the breadth of friendship, sibling love, and even its own chaste romance. In Brittney Cooper’s book, Eloquent Rage, she nails it. It’s romantic “in the soul-inspiring way that someone being thoughtful about loving you and showing up for you is romantic”.
All this causes a great discomfort at the table. My family, much like the rest of the world, hasn’t shifted from the heteronormative expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet around which all other relationships should orbit, and the fact that I’m renegading my perfectly functional romantic relationship to secondary in comparison with this less easily defined one causes a few raised eyebrows.
Ours is a relationship best defined by the tropes of TV. I’m a Miranda, she is Carrie. I am a Monica, she is a Rachel. Our shorthand for our big love, regularly exchanged via WhatsApp, is a gif of Thelma and Louise holding hands and sailing over the edge of a cliff. This image encapsulates basically everything I feel about our relationship, which is “I love you, I’m here for you and I’m not sure if we’re on a glorious adventure or if we’re sailing over a cliff, whichever it is, I’m here for it.”
Ultimately, I consider us a Thelma and Louise not because of the “ride or die” reference born out of the film, but because we hew closely to the film’s central and still relevant theme — the patriarchy-busting insistence that it’s unnecessary for the plot of women’s lives to revolve around a romantic pairing with a man instead of a friendship with a woman.
Indeed, when we began our cohabitation I considered it a comfortable placeholder while we both looked for husbands. How embarrassing to admit, as if that’s the pinnacle to aspire to. It’s 2021, and this isn’t some sort of finishing school from the 1950s. We started as convenient sharing of expenses, cooking delicious meals for each other and spending evenings alternating between playing cards and watching chick flicks. To be fair, I thought there would be nights out drinking whisky at bars as well, in search of the aforementioned husbands, but you know — Covid.
What blossomed in the pandemic’s emotionally fraught forge, along with a fearsomely competitive rummy championship, was a degree of feeling and loyalty far greater than what can be captured by the term “best friend” or, shudder, “housemate”. I realised we had travelled a long way from the realm of easily definable friendship when Ash was all in on raising a baby with me, during the episode of our friendship called “The one where I was too scared to take a pregnancy test, which was negative anyway.”
In fact, should a man try and dislodge me from this domestic bliss, it’s going to take some sort of emotional savant with the physique of an Olympic gymnast who can give a foot rub with one hand and brew a bad-ass pot of camomile tea with the other.
Last year, The Atlantic magazine asked what if friendship, not marriage, was at the centre of life? They explored a number of relationships similar to Ash and mine, and included this takeaway: “Many of those who place a friendship at the centre of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others. But these friendships can be models for how we, as a society, might expand our conceptions of intimacy and care.”
In light of the number of traditional romantic relationships that end in dissolution, it seems prudent from my vantage point to defang one’s meaningful domestic relationship from the complications that naturally arise from romantic and sexual entanglements.
The poet and philosopher David Whyte said this of friendship: “The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
Or, more succinctly, Carrie in Sex and the City: “They say nothing lasts forever; dreams change, trends come and go, but friendships never go out of style.”