what lives between romantic and maternal love?

an essay on female friendship

You find sleep easily and often earlier than me. Like a child, you wiggle and flail your limbs, sleeping with your arms above your head and a pink camisole exposing the top of your belly. I come in at night to return your things and look at you one last time before I find sleep. But your nose wakes first and you sniff me out, knowing it is me before even opening your eyes. You tell me to come closer, to join you in bed. You curl around my body and let your heat press up against the coolness of my skin. I pretend to find rest. I lay my hand too far up the meat of your thigh. You press your pelvis hard onto the bone of my thigh and I feel myself become sticky for you. Feel myself become animal for you. This you do not know but also acutely know and we make love for the first time. 

Our relationship ends as fast as it begins and then begins again a year later, when we tell each other we got it wrong the first time, we were meant to be friends, not lovers. We were meant to be mothers and sisters. When I do not find sleep, she massages my back and shoulders telling me where I am tight and carefully avoiding touching me in ways that may remind us of who we were to each other one year prior. I make her breakfast while she showers, yelling at her when it is ready and watching her scurry over, hair dripping into toast. She washes my hair, scrubbing in small circular motions, holding the nape of my neck. There is a new undeniable closeness now, there is a sweetness and tenderness that is not usual in friendship, this is true. And we have found that we are often mothers to each other. We take care of one another through the most generous and maternal acts, this is also true. 

In January, I write a poem for her in class with the line:

You know I throw tantrums when my words are too hard to chew on myself but you still put me to bed and tuck me in; roll me and mold me, touch me and hear me. 

To this my professor questions me on the relationship between the speaker and addressee, wondering if the relationship is maternal, romantic, sexual, or merely platonic. Though I responded swiftly and assured that the poem is about friendship, I left that meeting with the uncertainty that the poem was not also about maternal love, romantic moments, or remnants of the sexual left behind.  

The truth of the matter is that I have found much of the romance in my life through my female friendships. Through the sweetness and tenderness that is found when a female tends to another female’s body. And she is only one of many. Female friendships, the intimate kind, the ones that are written about in length in literature: in Toni Morrison’s Sula, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend Series, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and even Nella Larsen’s Passing all explore a relationship that reveals the complications of the self and the body when you are sharing such intimacy with another person. It is competitive and ferocious while being loving and tender. It is safety and resentment. It is exploring your own body through the learning of another’s and it is, in its very complexity and beauty, romantic.

In these friendships, girls and women hold her friend in her own hands—in the shower, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the private spaces of the home—and she finds an opportunity to hold her friend the way she wishes she could be held, was held, or will be held by the very girl in front of her. She finds patience and acceptance for her friend and her friend’s body which she had yet to permit for herself. She quickly finds a mothering role and a child-like role, caretaking and being taken care of in ways that mirror or obstruct the girls’ own relationships with their mothers. The two girls exchange a love that is selfless and generous while subconsciously participating in a process of self-healing and self-discovery through her female friend’s body. 

This exchange is inherently maternal in the very acts that are being given and received. They are caretaking: cooking for her friend, cleaning her body, putting her to sleep, wiping her tears, and protecting her. Yet at the same time, there is a crucial mother and daughter power dynamic that has been broken down: one of them has not come from the other’s womb, the age gap is likely small or nonexistent, and there are no financial responsibilities or dependencies at stake. This broken-down power dynamic opens the relationship up more than it already is, granting the girls even more space to be free with one another, play and fight with one another, and be curious with each other’s bodies. Ultimately leaving these kinds of intimate female friendships in the space between romantic and maternal love. 

I have often felt that the female friendships I have found in my life grant me all that is expected or needed from a romantic partner. Likewise, I have heard from the women in my life that they feel similarly, often asking, what am I supposed to ask for from my romantic partner if my best friend already gives me everything I need? Besides the sexual, which can become blurred and offered when the friendship is homoerotic, female friendships walk an intimate line of friendship, romance, and maternal care that often offers the girls all of the love, support, and care that they might require or that our culture has deemed necessary from a romantic partner. This may be not only why the loss of a female friendship can be more heartbreaking than the loss of a lover but also why women and girls may lower their standards for romantic partners (particularly men) as their needs and standards are already being met elsewhere, though that is for a different essay. 

Aside from the kind of dreamy, emotional, picture-esque romance that lingers throughout these friendships, intimate female friendships have also recently been credited for their routines and commitment which often mirror that of a romantic relationship. Rhaina Cohen writes in her article for the Atlantic: “Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in the same houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex”. As female friendships begin to become more of a hot topic in media, we are receiving more and more data that women and girls everywhere are participating in these intimate female friendships that are not only feeling like romantic partners but also acting like romantic partners.

Thus, female friendship becomes not only a space for maternal love but also a kind of romantic love as well, ultimately challenging and deconstructing the various forms of love (romantic, familial, and platonic) that our culture has structured and labeled. As this occurs throughout the intimacy of the relationship, there quickly becomes something queering about these relationships that can be identified. Not only can the friendships become homoerotic but they also grant an opportunity for women and girls to play all roles at once (mother, daughter, husband, wife, brother, and sister), without consideration for gender, age, or other structured roles within a culture. They allow women and girls to expand their very personhood and find power and agency in the intimacy of a friendship, in the intimacy of another female’s body. If camp, as Suan Sontag writes, “is the triumph of the epicene style”¹ then this kind of female friendship is camp and is queer in the ways in which it exists at a peak or a triumph of all and none simultaneously. Qualities of both sexes and neither, most obviously from Sontang’s definition, but also of both mother and daughter and neither, of lover and friend as well as neither. 

Our idea of androgyny, or of epicene, begins with the sexes and leaks into gender and clothing and art but I do not see it ending there. Androgyny finds its way into the roles of our culture, and thus the roles in which we love someone, due to the very fact that gender has found its way into all of the crooks of our lives. If we can love someone androgynously or with the “triumph of epicene” then we can love someone without fear, we can love them wholly. 

1. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (56)