Friendships are relationships. This idea seems to make people feel very uncomfortable but at the end of the day, they are. They are people we relate to and maintain positive regard for. We love our friends. This too makes some people squirm. Because we have no way to categorise this love, separate from that of romantic or familial love. But yet it is distinctly different.
Romantic love encompasses a passion, a level of attraction, and in most cases some forms of physical intimacy. Familial love encompasses a feeling so big, you might die for the other, and a level of security and comfort that perhaps friendship love does not always contain. Familail relationships don’t end. You may disown someone in your family, but that will never stop them from being family. Family is fact. Does that make friendship fiction?
Friendships can start and end spontaneously, and can cause joy and pain just like any other relationship. We seek out this connection more than any other type, on the basis of non monogamy and the freedom to enjoy many aspects of many people at once. We don’t usually expect one friend to meet all our needs and typically certain friends bring about certain aspects of ourselves that other friends do not.
But often times, along the way you meet someone special. Someone so important and big in your life that calling them a friend doesn’t seem big or special or important enough to reflect what they are or what they mean to you. People might assume, they are like family to you, but that doesn’t always fit either, and then there are often assumptions of underlying romantic notions which are also unfounded.
I suppose that is where the term best friend really comes from, another way to express that your friend is special, that the love between you is bigger than any other friendship, deeper, more powerful. But sometimes best friend doesn’t really fit either. Maybe your best friend is someone you see more regularly but this other person is someone you feel drawn and connected to on a soul level?
Soulmates is another term that makes people wrinkle their nose when said in relation to a friendship, so many might use soul sister or use terms like “my person.” These are all ways of basically saying that you have found your favourite person, standing alone as important outside of your other important relationships.
The question is bigger than what term to use to describe this person to others, because at the root of it, what we really want is a way to convey our big feelings and have them reflected back to us and understood and accepted. Not questioned, judged and criticized. If we want this person at Christmas with the family, for example, we want our family to understand, accept and welcome this person instead of question why they would be invited. Or if we want this person to inherit our children in the event of our untimely death, we want to know that our family will embrace and support this person and their journey without us.
Sometimes words just aren’t big enough to describe the weight and depth of our feelings. I could tell you to make up your own words like “frelationship” or I could encourage you to worry less about the words you use and more about the actions you take to demonstrate both to your favourite person, and to the other people around you and them that this relationship takes pride of place in your life, and that it is here to stay if they understand it or not, so they may as well accept it.
In time folks, with patience and perseverance, it will eventually go without saying that you and your person are a bit of a package deal, whether that means just you and them, or you and them and your significant others, or you and them and your family/extended family and their family/extended family.
You don’t have to answer the question of how or why or find language that fits, and sometimes the best and most honest thing to say is that there aren’t quite words to describe the connection, but then again, there never is when it comes to big love.
If you have a person like this in your life, consider yourself luckier than anyone who doesn’t quite understand it, and send wishes for them that they too, will one day find their person. Meanwhile continue living and loving, whoever you love and whatever that means for you!
❤ Love,
Your Best Friend ForNever
xx
