🫖 Hello, my good friends. I hope you’ve been having a gorgeous Tuesday (or, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday depending on when you read this). Everyone’s writing about friendship, so why shouldn’t I? Today’s reflections draw heavily on the things I’ve been reading and watching. Shoutout to all the geniuses mentioned in this post. If you’re new here, welcome! This is my newsletter that comes out weekly? biweekly? Who knows these days. The essay is free, and you can upgrade to paid to access the accompanying mixtape. Paying subscribers can also buckle up for tsundoku this week (my recommendation column). I love you all. 🫖
So much of what I’ve been consuming lately has touched upon those special relationships that exist outside, above, in-between, beyond, and mixed-up with romantic connection.
Waiting for an ungodly amount laundry to dry, I left the hum of the laundromat to leaf through the new Paris Review in the open air. “My Good Friend” is the story of a late-in-life romance that springs from the surviving members of two married couples. We peer into the pond of the past—the reflection offers us an image of two families intertwined. Married the same year, sharing the same wedding dress, renting neighboring houses. The two deceased spouses, Suzy and Roger, are named. The narrator and her “good friend” remain nameless. We lived as one tight-knit group of people, all mixed together.
In the story, friendship is analogous to love because, of course, it is love.
Our friendship goes back to before our marriages, it’s always poured out of everything and embraced all the people we chose along the way. The more my friend and I loved our spouses, the more we loved each other, too, as though both loves heightened and nurtured each other, even if one of them had come first.
As Suzy lay dying, the protagonist and her good friend swaddle her with their shared love. A best friend, a husband, and a wife.
My good friend and I would spoon Suzy, with her in the middle. We held hands, the three of us, and then we went to sleep. The children would tiptoe into the bedroom to take a closer look at those intertwined fingers, at our three hands joined at Suzy’s hip.
It’s nice to remember that love is long, if we let it be. An abundance of love doesn’t have to be sordid. It can be three hands, holding on at the end of life. Is there really such a thing as platonic love?
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I was presented with a different configuration of loves and lovers in rewatching Jules et Jim (1962) for the first time since it pierced my heart at the age of 18. I picked up sushi with my mostly ex-boyfriend (a good friend, if not my best friend), who had been helping me move furniture to my new bedroom. We pulled up two kitchen chairs and ate dinner on the coffee table. The new couch wouldn’t be delivered until Tuesday.
It’s a story of a Frenchman and an Austrian at the dawn of World War I. The two walk into each other’s lives in Paris and strike up a beautiful, fabulous, generative friendship. Their lives become even more enriched when the effervescent Catherine enters the fold. It started like a dream, remarks the narrator. Even as Jules and Catherine’s romantic connection grows, they are most balanced as a group of three, running through the streets like ragamuffins, or bicycling through the woods.
During the war, the friends are conscripted to opposing fronts. In the trenches, sometimes I’m afraid I’ll kill him, remarks Jim. In a letter to Catherine, Jules writes: I’m being sent to the Russian front. It will be tough… but I prefer it to the constant fear here of killing Jim.
After the war, they are reunited at the Austrian chalet where Jules and Catherine live with their daughter. Their marriage has grown tense. Catherine takes lovers and seems on the precipice of flight. That’s when the previously unconsummated spark between Jim and Catherine ignites. If you love her, stop thinking of me as an obstacle, says Jules to Jim. So, Jim moves into the chalet. He asks Catherine: What about Jules? She responds: He loves us both. He won’t be surprised and this way he’ll suffer less. We’ll go on loving and respecting him.
And for a while, it’s bliss. It’s community—two men, a woman, and a little girl. In one perfect scene, Jules and Catherine cordially embrace at the base of the stairs. She ascends and plucks the cigarette out of Jim’s mouth for a long, passionate kiss at the top of the stairs.
Of course, that’s not the end of the movie. Of course, the three have to be damned. But that glorious middle section is enough to feed a lifetime of daydreams. It’s a delight to see such unconventional love depicted on screen. You can be the right match at the wrong time or the wrong match at the right time. You can love your best friend as much as your girlfriend or you can all be boyfriends and girlfriends. You can always have a place in someone’s heart, and that doesn’t preclude them from having room for more. I will forever be touched by the unshakable love between Jim and Jules. It’s abundance. It’s a great fucking movie.
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In her most recent post to transient truths, Goni wrote movingly about one of her special friendships. She remarks that it’s almost impossible to explain a relationship that exists outside of most people’s imagination. When he introduces her to friends, he says: we grew up with only a wall between us. It sounds poetic, but it’s more literal than that. Their two families have shared a duplex for over two decades.
Her post also reflects on the abundance of love she witnessed in her family and community.
my parents are married and in love with each other, but they are in love with their friends and their lives in ways that hold their own against their romantic love. their partnership is not at the center of their lives, and they both wouldn’t want it any other way. they commit to their families, both blood and chosen, through bonds that are no less intentional and consequential than marriage. i am blessed and motivated by my opportunities to witness the abundance of love, the building of community, and the prioritization of people and partnership, broadly.
This description, too, could spark a lifetime of daydreams. I’d like to live in a world that prioritizes people and partnership, where the love of friends is never cheapened and the love of a spouse is never burdensome.
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On Wednesday, I was texting a friend about her upcoming trip out of New York for a wedding. A weekend without you? I said, Clutching my pearls. I was joking but I also kind of wasn’t. Our social drumbeats have been in harmony, and we’ve gotten into a rhythm. We hang out all the time. We split bottles of wine over pasta and focaccia at our respective apartments. I love her cats and I love her new place. At sprawling picnics, we share a corner of a blanket, and need to remind ourselves not to turn our backs on everyone else. Sometimes we aspire to write together, but we usually just talk. It’s a beautiful, fabulous, generative friendship. She is my good friend. Plus, she’s the great connector who has introduced me to many of the people and scenes filling up my social dance card these days. I felt a little nervous about a big, empty weekend where I’d have to figure it all out on my own.
I decided to go to a party on Saturday where I only knew one other person. And I knew that person because my good friend introduced me to him. As the day progressed, I wondered if I should just stay home.
As it turns out, it’s good to get out of your comfort zone. It’s good to go it alone (or practically alone). It’s good to light cigarettes for people you’ve never met and to shift under the weight of the shared unknown. It’s good to allow yourself to be a loose cannon. This invites growth. As Ava of bookbear express put it in her own recent post about friendship, going to social functions—whether you feel like it or not—is a way to maximize serendipity.
Even though she was out of town, my good friend was at the party too. She was there every time someone asked me how I came to be on that roof in Ridgewood. We met through our good friend, we said time and time again.
🫖 Thank you for reading! If you are a paid subscriber, keep scrolling to read about and listen to today’s mixtape. There are a lot of fun music videos/visualizers on the Youtube playlist today, I recommend it :) 🫖
6.13.23 Mixtape
Like my writing, today’s songs touch upon unconventional loves. Romances that spill out the corners, familial bonds, rich friendships, etc. Why not begin with the polyamorous anthem Multi-Love by Unknown Mortal Orchestra? It explores the frontman Ruban Nielson’s relationships with his wife and their third partner. 🎶 Multi-love's got me on my knee. We were one, then become three. 🎶 Funnily, Nielson said that he started writing the song BEFORE he even got entangled in polyamory. Life imitates art, blah blah. Up next, a song by the White Stripes, which is tragically overlooked, IMHO. It’s True That We Love One Another is a jaunty folk ditty, where Jack, Meg, and Holly Golightly (of the Headcoatees fame, not B at T’s) take us on a silly journey. There’s nothing quite like the way Holly croons 🎶 I love Jack White like a little brother. 🎶 Up next is the synthy delight, Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order. Back in school, I’d only go to the underground Main Stacks library when I desperately needed to finish an essay. To get myself pumped up, I’d blast this song as I took the bus to campus and strutted down Sproul. The lyrics are genius and the rhythm is ebullient. 🎶 I feel fine and I feel good. I'm feeling like I never should. Whenever I get this way, I just don't know what to say. Why can't we be ourselves like we were yesterday? 🎶 As one Youtube commenter said (lol): This song could be 40 minutes long and I'd still play it a second time. Facts! Strawberry Blond by Mitski opens with the fantastic line 🎶 I love everybody because I love you. 🎶 That lyric reminds me of the narrator from “My Good Friend” describing how the more they loved their spouses, the more they loved each other, and everyone else they picked up along the way. Though, Mitksi’s version tells a story of an aching and frustrated love, an unrequited desire. But, what’s more evocative than a crushing crush? Ok, let’s wrap things up with what’s perhaps the sweetest song in the world: In My Little Corner of the World by Anita Bryant. Yo La Tengo is always tricking me into discovering henceforth unknown classics. I’m linking the Bryant version here, but I love how the Yo La Tengo version makes the last verse plural. 🎶 We always knew that we’d find someone like you. 🎶 To me, it sounds like an homage to a child being conceived, but I enjoy that it’s open to interpretation.