The Friendship Plot

There are endless itemizable reasons, when one is a woman, why others might value you. Because you’re agreeable, because you smile easily, because you’re game. Because you’re pretty, have shiny hair, have a nice ass. Because you know exactly what questions to ask to make your conversation partner feel they are fascinating. Because you’d make a good wife, or good mother, or good PTO volunteer. Because you’re funny, but not bitingly funny. Because you’re smart, but not pedantically smart. Because you give excellent presents, or excellent advice, or excellent head.

I love my husband through and through. I love his steady mind, his quick sense of humor, his spirit of celebration. I love how we’ve grown together like two entwined branches, yielding and bending to support each other’s becoming. I love that, after more than two decades together, I am still caught off guard at times by how handsome I find him.

But I wonder sometimes if marriage, with its contractual origins, can ever fully transcend the transactional. In a marriage, it can feel as if something is always owed, because it’s entirely
impossible, despite the gauzy hopes we pin on matrimony, for two people to fulfill each other’s every need. And so shadowing my husband’s and my love—shadowing all marital love, perhaps—are the ways in which we suspect we are falling short, or getting shorted. It isn’t his fault, or my fault, that our relationship seems to consist of so much tallying—of who is or isn’t giving the other enough attention, or praise, or hope, or space, or comfort, or sex. No matter how sound a marriage is at its core, it is always, inevitably, haunted by its own illusory standards.

For us striving wives and mothers of the world, worn out from the exertions of trying to conform to a dream, female friendship might be the only place where we can simply be. Inside our cliques of two, there’s no script to follow, no end of the bargain to hold up, no proof to produce, again and again, that we are worthy. All that matters, in this quiet sanctuary, is that she is she. All that matters, in this sacred temple, is that you are you.

The mind so often leaps to the erotic when we talk about intimacy—a conditioned reflex, I assume, of living in a culture that prizes romantic love over other forms of affection. For centuries, across cultures, great thinkers have tried to make the case for platonic love. Plato argued that friendship—what the ancient Greeks called philia—is the highest form of human connection because it requires no physical attraction. In the Celtic tradition, the anam cara, or “soul friend,” has long been considered a vital element of human unfolding. The Buddha, when asked by his own friend Ananda whether friendship has a place in the spiritual life, declared that it is in fact “the whole of the spiritual life.” And yet, there’s something in us that loves to suspect the platonic of being “more” than platonic, that yearns to find in it a sexual through-line, burning its way toward a combustive and satisfying end.

In the Hebrew bible, sexual intercourse is often referred to by a form of the root yada, which means “to know.” When we’re told that Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived Cain—or that Cain knew his own wife, and she conceived Enoch—the word “know” is being used euphemistically. But it its own subtle and lovely way, it also points to the elements of intimacy that are cognitive rather than carnal: attending, perceiving, understanding, recognizing, allowing. Yada, in Hebrew, also means to grasp something to the depths of its being. Our spouses and lovers might have this sort of knowledge of us—but so, too, do our most treasured friends.

And yet, even as I make this distinction between the erotic and the platonic, it occurs to me that the deep knowing of friendship might be its own sort of physical union. It’s the melding of bodies I experience when I hear one of my best friend Sara’s expressions tumble from my lips, or when my eyebrow spontaneously rises exactly like hers. It’s the plug-and-socket fusion of brain circuitry I feel when I finish one of her sentences, or when she explains to me, because I just can’t figure it out, why that thing my father said yesterday left me feeling so sad.

Not long ago, a therapist friend told me that it’s common for her straight, married, women patients to admit to her “somewhat sheepishly” that while they love their husbands—of course, of course!—it’s with their female friends that they’ve experienced the greatest intimacy. This didn’t surprise me one bit. I can’t imagine it would surprise most women I know. And yet I, too, I realized, have tiptoed around a little “sheepishly” with this knowledge, as if by communing so nakedly with my closest women friends I am cheating on…who exactly? Not so much my husband, but the fundamental premise of what it means to be married.

Here, for the world to know, is the barely-hidden secret of us heterosexual ladies with our wedding bands and anniversary trips and date nights and glowing monogamous devotion to the men we married: wrapped tenderly and snugly around our hearts, like an invisible ring, is our love of another woman. Or two. Or more.

Nicole Graev Lipson is an essayist and author based outside of Boston. This piece is adapted from her new memoir Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, published by Chronicle Prism. Copyright © 2025 by NicoleGraev Lipson.