River: Friendship and love

[mdlbear]

The River winds back and forth across the wide, unmarked valley between Love and Friendship. Which side you're closest to at any given moment is less important than who's beside you on the journey. When you get down to it the River posts, like the song that inspired their name, are mostly about love and friendship.

Some people can draw a bright line between their emotions, and know with absolute certainty "I love X, but Y is just a close friend." They may even be able to say "I love Z, but Z is not my friend." I've never been able to do that. Even now, after 32+ years of marriage and my new-found insight into my feelings, I still can't do that. Sometimes it's very hard for me to tell whether somebody is an acquaintance or a friend; a close friend or someone I love. I'm not sure it matters that much to me. It matters, but I'll get back to that.

What I call "love" has always grown out of deep, close friendship.

Take another look at the second verse of The River:

When you're cold and alone in high hills of spent passion
Or lost in dark valleys of grief and despair
Remember clear water runs down to the river
And follow your friendship to lead you back there.

It's a river so deep that we can't see the bottom,
A river so long we can't walk to the end;
We'll journey together beside the clear water;
As deep and as long as the love of a friend.

Unlike the people who, apparently, associate "love" primarily with the intense but comparatively transient experience of falling in love, I've never been tempted to confuse the two -- I had what I call love first.

I've never fallen in love with a stranger, or with someone I hardly knew. I've never had the feeling that I'd found My One True Love, and would be happy forever if only she loved me back. I've never had the feeling that this one person was essential to my happiness, or that I could never be happy with anyone else. I've been desperately lonely, to be sure, but never desperately in love.

Because love, for me, is based on friendship, I've never had to worry about losing it. We may get closer or farther apart, but the friendship remains. I've never had to worry about rejection: I may be disappointed if a relationship doesn't go as far as I'd like it to go, but the friendship remains.

This is probably going to get long, but it's too important to cut. Deal with it.

I'll tell you a story:

Colleen and I were friends for a long time. She first spotted me the year I started grad school, as she was sitting with friends in the Stanford coffeehouse. We met now and then; went for walks together, met at events of various sorts, had long talks. At some point we started sleeping together. It was some time after that, that I felt comfortable saying "I love you." I'd never been in love before, you see. It really didn't feel that much different from being best friends. I'm not sure it does even now, after our love and friendship have deepened. There is a difference, but it's hard for me to say exactly what it is.

In effect, Colleen and I started our marriage, after a year of living together and four years of friendship, with the kind of love usually associated with "old married" couples: with friendship, trust, and a confident delight in one another's company. Yes, we've had disagreements, sometimes loudly enough to alarm the kids. But our friendship is solid enough to survive the occasional disagreement.

Even up to a couple of years after our marriage, I don't think I had any real certainty that what I was feeling could properly be called "love". There was never a moment of epiphany, no bells or choirs of angels, no desperate longing. But we'd been living together, sharing our lives, our fortunes, our kitchen, our roof and our bed, for most of a year, and I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my best and dearest friend, and that was enough no matter what you call it.

I told her so, and we became formally engaged, exactly 33 years ago today: October 11th, 1975. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

So, does it matter what you call it?

Oddly enough, it does matter. It matters very much. I'm not sure exactly why, but I'll give you what I have at the moment.

Certainly, it matters to other people. Across the huge semantic gulf that separates me from most other people, even with the necessary disclaimers and qualifiers required to bridge that gulf, saying "I love you" sends a strong, if uncomfortably ambiguous, signal.

And it matters to me, even if I'm not certain what it means. Mostly, I think, using the word "love" says that the emotional component of the relationship is serious enough to be taken seriously.

That's it, really. When love comes into a relationship, on your end of the conversation or on mine, it means that the emotional component of that relationship is strong enough to matter. Something that's worth talking about. Working on. Caring about. Nurturing. Fighting for, maybe. Enjoying and celebrating, certainly. Committing to, perhaps.

That's it?

Almost certainly not, but it's what I can think of at the moment. Oh, sure, there's a lot more. But it all seem to come out of taking the emotional relationship seriously enough to want it to continue, and deepen. (Disclaimer: I'm new to this game. I could be totally wrong about all this.)

Let's take sex, for example. It's not called "making love" for nothing. But what's the difference between casual, recreational sex and sex with someone you love, if not that you're taking it, and its place in your relationship, seriously? You care about one another. It makes you feel closer, more connected, more joyful. If you're just starting out, taking it seriously means that you've taken the time and the care to talk about it and what it will do to your relationship.

Or look at the potentially difficult topics of platonic love and romantic friendship. See how simple they become when you realize that love is "just" a deeper and more emotionally-connected form of friendship?

I'm not sure I believe this analysis myself. Next week I'll probably think of some fatal flaw; I'm sure this won't be my last post exploring this topic. And certainly what I mean by "love" seems to be a lot different from what other people mean by it. Can we still communicate? I hope so. I'll get back to that.

But what about falling in love?

Yes, there's limerence, that "falling-in-love feeling" -- I'm getting a little better at recognizing it now. I don't think I felt it when Colleen and I were courting; but I've felt it several times since. Falling in love, repeatedly, with the person you're already married to is simply delightful, and saves a great deal of emotional wear-and-tear -- and tears, for that matter. I've fallen in love a couple of times with other women, fairly recently; that's a subject for another post, perhaps.

It's entirely possible that I wasn't really capable of falling in love thirty years ago: I've gone through some huge emotional changes since then. Or perhaps I was simply a lot less in touch with my emotions.

But I hadn't felt it before I fell in with Colleen. I've never fallen in "love at first sight", or fallen in love with anyone but a friend. Maybe that disqualifies me from having an opinion worth listening to on the subject. Or maybe it qualifies me by making me more objective. Here it is, anyway, for what it's worth:

At best, limerence is an indication that the potential for love is there. New Relationship Energy (NRE), the delightful feeling of starting a new relationship, is also a hint at best. At worst they're powerful drugs that you can easily get addicted to. When the effect wears off you might find yourself in the arms of your best friend and lover, amazed that you never understood what love really is. That's if you're lucky. Or you may find yourself in the bed of a stranger, wondering what in blazes possessed you. You may find yourself unable to pull yourself out of a horrible, abusive relationship because, every once in a while, you get another fix.

(Colleen's comment is that, of course, she fell in love with me at first sight. She had the good sense, rather than tell me immediately and risk almost certain rejection, to patiently cultivate my friendship until it was safe to tell me. That works.)

It's best to be friends first.

So here we are, back again, with friendship. I recommend it.

To be honest, I have no way of knowing whether a long-term relationship would work without at least one partner falling in love with the other. I think it would, but it would probably take a long time to even be recognized as something beyond "mere" friendship.

I'm pretty sure a long-term relationship won't last without friendship. And I think it needs a strong enough emotional bond that both parties are comfortable calling it "love" and committing to working with their friend to keep it going.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Gotta agree, really ought to be friends first, even if just for a few weeks. I did have one relationship that started as badda-boom-badda-bing and *devolved* into a really strong friendship... but I think she was an exception... and I'm currently rebuilding a relationship that started as love, fractured, and then we rebuilt a friendship as a foundation and are re-re-discovering love on top of it.

'nother take on it: For someone I've grown quite close to, saying "I love you" is, of itself, an indication of a commitment to relationship-building. I find I rather like that idea...

Oh, one other comment: Love is at its very best when the connection is on multiple levels. Friendship, kindness, humor, spirituality, and, of course, romance. And, yeah... there's having sex, doing it for the endorphin factor and/or because partner's body turns you on... and there's making love, creating connection on multiple levels just for the joy of being with the other person. (Take it as read that N can be more than two :)

And, no, if you don't have something vaguely resembling friendship, there's gonna be pain and breakage and general badness eventually. And if you don't work on it, for whatever reason, it eventually goes kaplooie. Bin There, Dun that on the second one. Not making that mistake again if I can help it.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I've never had a romantic relationship which worked -- even temporarily; and I do consider a relationship successful if it was good temporarily and ended with less harm than the good it did prior to that, it doesn't need to have been permanent to have been good -- which didn't start as a friendship. I have had romantic relationships in which I had started off with an instant attraction to someone and then cultivated the friendship because of that, like a moth drawn to a candle, but like Colleen did, what I start off trying to do if I have "falling in love" feelings for someone initially is to try to become friends with them and find out more about them. If that works, then I might raise the subject of a romantic involvement later.

[mdlbear]

*nod*

I haven't had enough romantic relationships to have much data on the subject, so it's good to have that confirmed.

[mdlbear]

A few more thoughts:

No relationship is permanent, I'm afraid, if for no other reason than that we're all mortal. The best one can do is make the most of the time one has.

It seems to me that the instant attraction can make it very tempting to cut corners; one might miss something important, or minimize a potential problem, or scare the other person off with too much intensity. On the other hand, waiting too long means you're missing an opportunity to, potentially, enjoy the deeper relationship. I've always been the one who errs on the side of caution; I'm sure I've missed a lot over the years.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

dunkelpig knew I was It the moment she saw me -- God only knows why. I was slower: it took me till sometime after midnight of a day of, together, handing out election flyers, buttonholing strangers, stuffing envelopes, having some kind of fast dinner, etc., etc., to realize that this was more than just an enjoyable afternoon and evening with a nice girl.

That was September 21-22, 1968. She's still my very best friend in all the world, and my dearest dear beloved.

[mdlbear]

That was still quick work; it took me several years to catch on. Of course, Colleen was being extra cautious, and I was incredibly shy and geekish.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

Insightful as always. Due to lack of experience, I have nothing of significance to add, other than that I have occasionally also thought that I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone who wasn't also a friend. Once again, you clearly articulated a fully formed version one of the vague ideas that bounces around in my head. These "River" posts are truly amazing sometimes.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

Actually, not just fully formed versions. Fully formed, greatly extended and better thought out.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I'm a tremendous believer in love, in all its forms - to some degree, I still consider myself a priestess of Aphrodite, Erzulie, and Ishtar. In my own life, I've found myself striking up a friendship, and finding, some time later, to my own surprise, that my feelings for the other person had expanded to include romantic and/or sexual love. I've also met someone and immediately fallen madly in bed with them, only to realize later on that we were far better off being friends than lovers. (And just about everything in between.) In general, though, sexual lust isn't enough, and romantic love isn't enough, to make two people a couple; there has to be friendship as well, whether it comes before the other factors, or develops slowly as the relationship progresses. Incidentally, I've been married to the same man for 35 years ("and we're going to keep at it until we get it right").

[mdlbear]

*nodnod* I'm in complete agreement here. The first experience, certainly. I can't be said to have fallen "madly in bed" with anybody (though I'd love to try it sometime), but close enough; better off as friends certainly applies in several cases.

And that is a *wonderful* userpic!

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've had sex with more than one person whom I knew before I started was entirely the wrong person... but they just made it feel so good that I was willing to deal with the pain that I knew would happen after they were gone.

I'm very proud of my purple chrome-plated rose. I believe it was once just the same, only red; at any rate, I had to Photoshop it severely before I got it purple, within the limits of what I could get away with online.