The Mystical Unions of Friendship
written by Colleen Callery
There is something really magical about friendship. As someone who was far from “popular” growing up and often found it hard to feel like I fit in, friendships have been the backbone of my understanding of myself and of the world around me. They reflect and mirror who we are, who we think we are, who we want to be. In a world that feels scary or confusing or just really, really big, finding even one person who seems to be on our particular wavelength is something of a miracle.
This National Friendship Day (July 30) comes in the middle of a national pandemic, where the first thing to go was unnecessary social contact. At first, there was an air of panic: weekly zoom calls with friends to replace the missing happy hours, email chains started floating around asking for recipes and reading recommendations, etc. But four months in, and with no clear end in sight, the mood has turned from one of heightened fervor to one of a more sustained cultivation. Gone are the days of bumping into friends on the street corner, of asking a new coworker if they want to grab a drink after work, of meeting up at an event and melding disparate friend groups. This moment has necessitated a seismic shift in how we think about friendships and what they look like.
Maybe this is why I was especially interested in the release of Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman’s book about this very topic, Big Friendship, a few weeks ago. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one. We hosted them for a book chat in July and sold out of our 500 person Zoom capacity and can’t seem to keep the book on the shelves. The two have made a name for themselves as friends and hosts of the popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend, where they encourage healthy and active long-distance friendships. Something that feels particularly relevant now that many more friendships fall into this category -- even if not geographically.
In fact, this idea of distance being not only normal, but necessary to friendship is one I ran across while reading Simone Weil’s thoughts on the subject and keep coming back to. For Weil, friendship was part of the Trinity -- one aspect of love that exemplified God. And inherent to friendships was the natural movements of meeting and separation. Without this separation, the relationship moves into another category, either one of romantic union, or one of spiritual devotion, both of which the goal is to become one. With friendships, the whole point is the distance, maintaining two separate beings.
In her essay titled “Friendship”, Weil writes, “Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to him as food.”
And indeed, it is in that distance that so much strife, but also magic resides. It is in that space that insecurity, envy, even carelessness can manifest. Which is why when friendships do survive and thrive, their success is just that much more remarkable. Reciprocity is essential, as is intentional and deliberate care. In Big Friendship, Aminatou notes how watching her parents write letters to friends and family for years even without reliable mail services in their part of West Africa impressed upon her how these correspondence skills were very much an art. And, I would argue, very much rooted in love.
As Elena Ferrante, author of one of the most popular series depicting a lifelong friendship in the Neapolitan novels, wrote in a 2014 Guardian column, “The Italian word for ‘friendship’, amicizia, has the same root as the verb ‘to love’, amare, and a relationship between friends has the richness, the complexity, the contradictions, the inconsistencies of love.”
To me, what makes friendships so mystical is their elasticity, their (seemingly) eternal grace. The idea that someone can so fully trust and care for you (and you them) that the shape of the relationship is able to shift and morph into various shapes over time is one that continues to surprise and inspire me. And in this way, contradictory to what the terms like “friend-zoned” and “just friends” suggest, I would argue friendship is the pinnacle of an affectionate relationship. Friends are necessary to our growth and healing, especially when our world looks so unfamiliar.
So today, do yourself a favor and write your friends, call them, send them a care package and let them know how much they mean to you. Strengthening these bonds are vital for community and individual survival, and is just fun! How amazing and worth celebrating to acknowledge the particular magic you have found with someone else.
