Valentine’s Day Questions on Platonic Intimacy

 In our nearly four year friendship, my friend M and I have shared moments I used to believe were only possible with a romantic partner: While watching Netflix together, we sometimes hold hands or take turns playing with each other’s hair. We send random texts that simply say “I love you!!” whenever the thought pops up in our heads. When I got a terrible flu (pre-Covid) she took care of me for all weekend, heated up soup and served it to me in bed, made me ginger lemon tea. When she got a concussion a few years back, our friends took turns staying with her in her hospital room in intensive care. Every time we visited, the nurse would look at us skeptically and ask:

“Who is her family?” 

We’d just keep replying “We are.” 

Part of being mostly single for nearly three years (by far the longest I’d ever been) at the end of my twenties meant that I had to become exponentially better at making friends. I made more friends in those three years than all of my twenties combined. Without romantic intimacy as a constant given, my life had space for creating new kinds of intimacy under platonic boundaries. And with a fairly queer circle of friends, many friendships began subverting what platonic friendship looks like, and extending the reach of intimacy we allowed for them. In October one year, I went to a wedding as a queer friend’s plus one. I spent a Valentine’s Day drinking wine and watching movies with a queer friend who bought me flowers. With M and other friends, sometimes I’d crash at their place cuddled next to them after a late night of dancing and we’d wake up together on Sunday, make coffee and eggs, read books in our pajamas, a Spotify playlist humming in the background and it kinda felt like we had been married for years.

In my early twenties, I could only understand intimacy as sexual/romantic connection coupled with a tragedy, or a confession of shame. When I think of the most early intimate moments of my life, they fall under this definition: being the first person a partner called when his father died when we were both nineteen. Laying in a hotel room in blue early morning light, after accompanying a partner to his friend’s funeral, facing each other in bed, his hand holding mine, clutched against my chest as he told me: 

“You know, he was my best friend.” 

Intimacy was listening to someone confess their saddest stories. It was holding space for someone when they broke down in tears. 

Thought that intimacy is valid and important, lately, I’m also understanding intimacy that does not have to be built on sex nor sadness, but instead on a foundation of deep, joyful vulnerability between two people—no matter what other role they play in your life. 

Intimacy is the mornings my roommates and I drink coffee surrounding our kitchen island counter. Intimacy is the Google doc I share with a friend to write all the queer insecurities we are both too scared to talk about out loud. Intimacy is reading the first chapter of a book out loud with a friend on a beach, looking up from the last sentences to find you both have teared up from its last lines. 

Intimacy is having your straight cis male partner trim your cliche queer girl haircut, weeks before you’re about to come out to your family. Intimacy is doing drag together for the first time. Intimacy is visiting a friend’s hometown. It’s taking psychedelics together under redwood trees. It’s sharing a first draft of your writing. It’s relationships that feel both safe and always growing.

I’ve written before about how traveling expanded my idea of intimacy even further. For travelers, an intimate relationship can be transient, or non-physical, or even exist among strangers. It can be hours chatting on WhatsApp, but only seeing each other in person once in decades. It can be an afternoon conversation on a bus that you’ll remember for the rest of your life.  

I want to cherish the sacredness of all these relationships, honor them and take them seriously —in a way I have often so easily and obviously done with romantic ones that hadn’t even necessarily earned it. 

A few years ago, in an internet spiral, I learned the term “relationship anarchy” and came across this anonymous writing on the topic: 

“I’ve stopped classifying things as ‘love’ or ‘friendship’ according to arbitrary superficial details—the feelings I share with certain friends are so intimate, so beautiful, that it’s ridiculous that I don’t call them lovers just because we don’t sleep together. It’s f*cking absurd that sex should be the dividing line between our relationships, between which ones take precedence, between who we play with, live with, sleep with, who we take care of first, who we die with at last.”

With all the grief and complications of life under a pandemic this year, the criteria from which we decide who takes precedence in our life seems even more critical. And in many ways, under the urgent pressure of a pandemic, it is become much easier to fall back on the traditional, instead of imagining what else can be built (so many queer friends and I have joked that the pandemic is so devastatingly Straight that it takes very real effort to act queer under these conditions). 

Below are some of the questions I’ve reflected on recently — questions I used to believe, by default, were reserved only for romantic partnership. 

Questions on Platonic Intimacy

-Who do I want to send love letters to? Holiday Gifts? Flowers?
-Who do I want to romance?
-Who would I reserve time to travel with? Who can I have honeymoons with?
-Who would I take a sabbatical with?
-Who would I move with, if they decide to move to a different place?
-Who do I want to pick up at the airport?
-Whose work do I want to put extra effort to support and celebrate?
-Who would I financially support as they pursue something they need or want?
-Who do I want to be in political and personal solidarity with?
-Who do I want to see every morning in the kitchen when I make coffee?
-Who do I want to help move/install new appliances/build an Ikea bedframe/do other mundane shit that requires multiple people?
-When they are sick, will I take responsibility for taking care of them? Who will take responsibility for taking care of me?
-Who would I share my health insurance with?
-Who would I share my savings with?
-Who would I connect my finances with?
-Who would I create a home with?
-Who would I raise children with?
-With whom do I want to feel “a part of the family?”
-Who do I want to explore my sexuality with?
-Who do I want to explore different forms of consciousness and spirituality with?
-Who do I want to share my creative process with?
-Who do I want to share physical intimacy with? Who do I want to cuddle? Give massages? Hold their hands?
-Who would I fly long-distances for to celebrate milestones and significant events with?
-Who do I want to spend holidays with?
-Who do I want to attend funerals with?
-Who do I want to attend weddings with?
-How can I be more of a “+1” to the lives of everyone I love? 

During those years of being single, and surrounded mostly by other single queer friends, we talked so much about the societally-ingrained fear of “being alone for the rest of my life.” But when I think more deeply on that time, any fear I ever had of “being alone” was really just a fear of having no one as an answer to these questions — no one allowed to be an answer — other than a hypothetical husband or a wife. And even in a year of now having romantic partnership, I still don’t want our relationship to be our only answers. I still want to know what other kinds of intimacy we could give ourselves the permission to indulge. 

I think of these lines from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem: “Two Countries” 

“Even now, when skin is not alone,

it remembers being alone and thanks something larger

that there are travelers, that people go places

larger than themselves.”

Maybe when I’ve called myself a traveler, this is what I really meant: all I really wanted was a life of intimacy. All I ever wanted was to be larger than my own skin.