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labingi"Boston Partnership: A Defense of Primary Friendship"
"The only thing lacking in Izzy's life was a romantic relationship, but even that wasn't enough to spoil the sense of peace that had settled over her. So many of her friends were single that it didn't seem odd for her to be that way as well. They filled up the holes in each other's lives and managed to pretend, most of the time, that they didn't need anything else."
--Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream. New York: Tot, 1994. p. 334.
Preamble:
Our dominant cultural narrative pretty much thinks friendship is unimportant. The de Lint passage I've quoted, in fact, comes from a novel that is notable in emphasizing friendship over romance. Even so, it gives us lines like this, just like 90% of the songs on the favorite radio station of the teenage girl I mentor. Just like one of this season's Doctor Who episodes, in which the Doctor protests, in the age-old words, that he and River are "just friends."
So convinced is our society that one's greatest loves (aside from one's children) must be based on sexual attraction that the movie, Troy, all but erased the second most important character in the Iliad because if Patroclus looked like the love of Achilles's life, it must mean they were sexually in love (and would, thus, frighten the audience with their "gayness"). So convinced are we of this that even the spectacularly toned down scenes of affection between Frodo and Sam in the Mordor segment of the Return of the King movie earned jibes of "faggots" from certain moviegoers in a Serbian theater, according to a friend of mine. My point is not that these relationships necessarily preclude sex, but rather that our society immediately assumes that if two people are deeply loving, they must love sexually (either overtly or unconsciously) because "true love" is "sexual love" by definition.
I suspect we owe this rejection of so much of the human heart to two historical factors: 1) what C. S. Lewis called "the allegory of love," the high medieval courtly romance that first framed "true love" for us as the knight and lady falling into eros, usually in opposition to the prevailing laws and customs,[1] and 2) Freud's absurd contention that the basis of everything in the human psyche is sex. But it's the 21st century and high time stop living both in the Middle Ages and the age of Victorian prudery and its discontents.
Love can be sexual certainly, and sex can be loving. But love, even beyond familial love, is ever so much bigger than that, and our society's delegitimatizing of love based on friendship rather than sexual attraction is as damaging to people's hearts and lives as homophobia, and for exactly the same reason: it tells people who bond based on friendship rather than sexual chemistry that their love is impossible, unreal, or invalid until, often, even they themselves believe it and choose bad "romantic" relationships over their true loves. It makes people blind to their own hearts and unable to be open to the hearts of others, and if by some miracle two "friends" do find each other, it is almost certain their social circle will fail to honor, accept, or even perceive the existence of their bond, unless it is able to "pass" for a primarily romantic bond.
A decent regard for people's happiness demands that this be changed. And the first step toward change is to create a vocabulary for this love with no name to speak. "Platonic partnership" is different, as I'll explain presently. Instead, I've adopted the phrase "Boston partnership," a takeoff on "Boston marriage" (the early 20th century institution of two women cohabiting as life partners), with a nod to Boston Legal, a show whose lead characters, Alan and Denny, exemplify this type of relationship.
Boston Partnership:
Boston partnership is a primary relationship whose foundation is friendship.
By "primary relationship," I mean one in which each person figures prominently in the life decisions of the other. In our society, "primary relationships" are assumed to exist within nuclear families and between spouses or the equivalent. My parents and I have a primary relationship: we include each other in life planning. They're moving to a new state to be close to me. Likewise, when my best friend moved to Kansas to be with her husband who had enlisted in the Army, she made a primary relationship choice.
In our society, "friends"--even "best friends"--are assumed to have a "secondary relationship," one in which--however loving and stable it may be--the participants do not include each other prominently in life decisions. When my best friend announced to me that she and her husband were moving to Kansas, it radically and permanently altered my life and my relationship with her, but it was understood I had no role in that decision. Our relationship is secondary.
Boston partnership allows friendship to be primary. Such a relationship may look very different from a traditional marriage or it may be one, but it is not founded on our society's standard romantic, domestic partner paradigm.
It is founded on being friends: on getting along, enjoying each other's company, enjoying similar pastimes, being supports for each other, and being fairly equal individuals with low power differential and little gendering. It does not assume the need for "chemistry," sex or sexual monogamy, shared income, living together, raising kids together, marriage, etc., though any of these things might be present in a particular relationship. It does imply love and emotional commitment, backed by a commitment to maintain a "primary relationship."
Boston partnerships are actually quite common, both in life and literature, though they are so silenced in real life that I can identify few examples that don't come from my circle of personal acquaintance. We almost never hear of them in public because we've had no word for them and are trained not to see them. (When we do see them, we almost always reframe them as romance, hence much of the institution of slash fan fiction.)
Examples of Boston partnerships:
* Kirk and Spock
* Starsky and Hutch
* Mulder and Scully
* Frodo and Sam (I'd argue even through Sam's marriage, though it took a long hiatus)
* Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights
* Alan and Denny from Boston Legal
* Achilles and Patroclus
* Gilgamesh and Enkidu
* Xena and Gabrielle
* Cece and Hilary from Beaches
* Brandon and Harry from Gungrave
* George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw
* Virginia and Leonard Woolf
* L and Watari from Death Note
* Holmes and Watson
* Ash and Eiji from Banana Fish
* Hyakurin and Giichi from Blade of the Immortal
* Schmendrick and Molly from The Last Unicorn (by the end/in the sequel short story)
* Sapphire and Steel (professional partners, but since work seems to be their entire lives...)
* Riki and Guy from Ai no Kusabi
This list highlights the fact that Boston partnership is not defined by many of the characteristics we typically use to classify life partnerships.
* It is not defined by the gender of the partners: Mulder and Scully are male/female, Starsky and Hutch male/male, Xena and Gabrielle female/female.
* It is not defined by the degree of sexual attraction or activity in the relationship. This is why it is not synonymous with "platonic partnership": Harry and Brandon have no sexual attraction; Mulder and Scully end up in a sexual relationship; Riki and Guy start out in a sexual relationship almost while still children. Were Achilles and Patroclus having sex? The fact that the unanswerability of this question across 2500 years of debate has not diminished Western Civilization's devotion to the story demonstrates how truly irrelevant the question is.
* It is not defined by the sexual orientation of the partners: Harry and Brandon are straight; Riki and Guy... are not; Xena and Gabrielle are "thespians."
* It is not defined by legal status: the Shaws were married; Patroclus is Achilles's "guest friend" (a formally understood role); Holmes and Watson just lodge together sometimes (and Watson married someone else).
* It is not defined by its health or success: Schmendrick and Molly share a harmonious life for decades; Harry kills Brandon in a fit of pique; Cathy and Heathcliff are... well...
* It is not, like "domestic partnership" benefits, defined by living together and/or sharing finances: the Woolfs did; Cece and Hilary do sometimes; Kirk and Spock only do when they're working on the same ship; Frodo and Sam spend many decades divided by a mystical sea journey.
Yet Boston partnership is a specific, definable thing. It is a primary relationship based first and foremost on being friends, and many relationships are not this type of partnership.
Examples of not Boston partnerships:
(Your reality, of course, may differ.)
* Buffy, Willow, Xander (So close, but as much as they are the primary stable supports in each other's lives, they never quite reach the point of acknowledging it. Each is looking for "the partner," the one Buffy will be ready for when she's a fully baked cookie.)
* Hawkeye and B.J. in M*A*S*H (Close to Boston partners in Korea but only because war thrust them together. In the end, they'll go home to California and Maine and be secondary friends.)
* Mal and Zoe in Firefly (Classic bff, close, loyal, but the primary partner is Wash.)
* Blake and Avon (Never acknowledge the primary role they clearly have in each other's lives. In other words, they're not quite "friends.")
* John and Aeryn from Farscape (Friends sometimes, but founded on the trepidation and salvation of romance)
* Steed and Emma from The Avengers (She will go back to Peter eventually.)
* Weiß Kreuz ("Just friends, sir," as Margaret said of Frank.)
* Ash and Shorter from Banana Fish (classic bff)
* Adama and Tigh from BSG (classic bff)
* Kagetora and Naoe from Mirage of Blaze (pure high passion)
* Kusaka and Akizuki from Winter Cicada (classically in love)
* Anotsu and Magatsu from Blade of the Immortal (Bff: they save each other's lives, but with a clear understanding that their individual lives run separately.)
* Anotsu and Makie from Blade of the Immortal (Their paradigm, while atypical, is importantly based in traditional gender assumptions about erotic love. They are friends, though, and the longer they are together, the more Boston-partner-like they become. This is a common trajectory for long-term, healthy romances. Most couples by their 50th anniversary are probably Boston partners, regardless of how they started out. As Mary Wollstonecraft observed, in marriage, "Friendship or indifference inevitably succeeds [sexual] love" (Vindication ch. 2). Just like our sexuality, our relationships shift and evolve.)
Conclusion
The concept that friendship can be a primary relationship matters. The basic possibility of many people's happiness depends on our recognition of the legitimacy of this paradigm of love, as surely as it rests on validating gay love. There's an episode of Boston Legal in which Alan laments that our society too loosely throws around the words "love" and "best friend" until they become almost meaningless: "People walk around today calling everyone their best friend. The term doesn't have any real meaning anymore." But a best friend, a true Friend (whether sex is involved or not), is as precious as any lover, and the more we dilute the idea of Friendship-- the longer we insult it with the modifier "just"--the more we undermine the life-defining power of love. "I love you, Denny," says Alan. "You are my best friend."
Note:
[1] Lewis contends, "We are tempted to treat 'courtly love' as a mere episode in literary history.... In fact, however, an unmistakable continuity connects the Provençal love song... with that of the present day. If the thing at first escapes our notice, this is because we are so familiar with the erotic tradition of modern Europe that we mistake it for something natural and universal and therefore do not inquire into its origins. It seems to us natural that [romantic] love should be commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence." (The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1958. p. 3)
"The only thing lacking in Izzy's life was a romantic relationship, but even that wasn't enough to spoil the sense of peace that had settled over her. So many of her friends were single that it didn't seem odd for her to be that way as well. They filled up the holes in each other's lives and managed to pretend, most of the time, that they didn't need anything else."
--Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream. New York: Tot, 1994. p. 334.
Preamble:
Our dominant cultural narrative pretty much thinks friendship is unimportant. The de Lint passage I've quoted, in fact, comes from a novel that is notable in emphasizing friendship over romance. Even so, it gives us lines like this, just like 90% of the songs on the favorite radio station of the teenage girl I mentor. Just like one of this season's Doctor Who episodes, in which the Doctor protests, in the age-old words, that he and River are "just friends."
So convinced is our society that one's greatest loves (aside from one's children) must be based on sexual attraction that the movie, Troy, all but erased the second most important character in the Iliad because if Patroclus looked like the love of Achilles's life, it must mean they were sexually in love (and would, thus, frighten the audience with their "gayness"). So convinced are we of this that even the spectacularly toned down scenes of affection between Frodo and Sam in the Mordor segment of the Return of the King movie earned jibes of "faggots" from certain moviegoers in a Serbian theater, according to a friend of mine. My point is not that these relationships necessarily preclude sex, but rather that our society immediately assumes that if two people are deeply loving, they must love sexually (either overtly or unconsciously) because "true love" is "sexual love" by definition.
I suspect we owe this rejection of so much of the human heart to two historical factors: 1) what C. S. Lewis called "the allegory of love," the high medieval courtly romance that first framed "true love" for us as the knight and lady falling into eros, usually in opposition to the prevailing laws and customs,[1] and 2) Freud's absurd contention that the basis of everything in the human psyche is sex. But it's the 21st century and high time stop living both in the Middle Ages and the age of Victorian prudery and its discontents.
Love can be sexual certainly, and sex can be loving. But love, even beyond familial love, is ever so much bigger than that, and our society's delegitimatizing of love based on friendship rather than sexual attraction is as damaging to people's hearts and lives as homophobia, and for exactly the same reason: it tells people who bond based on friendship rather than sexual chemistry that their love is impossible, unreal, or invalid until, often, even they themselves believe it and choose bad "romantic" relationships over their true loves. It makes people blind to their own hearts and unable to be open to the hearts of others, and if by some miracle two "friends" do find each other, it is almost certain their social circle will fail to honor, accept, or even perceive the existence of their bond, unless it is able to "pass" for a primarily romantic bond.
A decent regard for people's happiness demands that this be changed. And the first step toward change is to create a vocabulary for this love with no name to speak. "Platonic partnership" is different, as I'll explain presently. Instead, I've adopted the phrase "Boston partnership," a takeoff on "Boston marriage" (the early 20th century institution of two women cohabiting as life partners), with a nod to Boston Legal, a show whose lead characters, Alan and Denny, exemplify this type of relationship.
Boston Partnership:
Boston partnership is a primary relationship whose foundation is friendship.
By "primary relationship," I mean one in which each person figures prominently in the life decisions of the other. In our society, "primary relationships" are assumed to exist within nuclear families and between spouses or the equivalent. My parents and I have a primary relationship: we include each other in life planning. They're moving to a new state to be close to me. Likewise, when my best friend moved to Kansas to be with her husband who had enlisted in the Army, she made a primary relationship choice.
In our society, "friends"--even "best friends"--are assumed to have a "secondary relationship," one in which--however loving and stable it may be--the participants do not include each other prominently in life decisions. When my best friend announced to me that she and her husband were moving to Kansas, it radically and permanently altered my life and my relationship with her, but it was understood I had no role in that decision. Our relationship is secondary.
Boston partnership allows friendship to be primary. Such a relationship may look very different from a traditional marriage or it may be one, but it is not founded on our society's standard romantic, domestic partner paradigm.
It is founded on being friends: on getting along, enjoying each other's company, enjoying similar pastimes, being supports for each other, and being fairly equal individuals with low power differential and little gendering. It does not assume the need for "chemistry," sex or sexual monogamy, shared income, living together, raising kids together, marriage, etc., though any of these things might be present in a particular relationship. It does imply love and emotional commitment, backed by a commitment to maintain a "primary relationship."
Boston partnerships are actually quite common, both in life and literature, though they are so silenced in real life that I can identify few examples that don't come from my circle of personal acquaintance. We almost never hear of them in public because we've had no word for them and are trained not to see them. (When we do see them, we almost always reframe them as romance, hence much of the institution of slash fan fiction.)
Examples of Boston partnerships:
* Kirk and Spock
* Starsky and Hutch
* Mulder and Scully
* Frodo and Sam (I'd argue even through Sam's marriage, though it took a long hiatus)
* Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights
* Alan and Denny from Boston Legal
* Achilles and Patroclus
* Gilgamesh and Enkidu
* Xena and Gabrielle
* Cece and Hilary from Beaches
* Brandon and Harry from Gungrave
* George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw
* Virginia and Leonard Woolf
* L and Watari from Death Note
* Holmes and Watson
* Ash and Eiji from Banana Fish
* Hyakurin and Giichi from Blade of the Immortal
* Schmendrick and Molly from The Last Unicorn (by the end/in the sequel short story)
* Sapphire and Steel (professional partners, but since work seems to be their entire lives...)
* Riki and Guy from Ai no Kusabi
This list highlights the fact that Boston partnership is not defined by many of the characteristics we typically use to classify life partnerships.
* It is not defined by the gender of the partners: Mulder and Scully are male/female, Starsky and Hutch male/male, Xena and Gabrielle female/female.
* It is not defined by the degree of sexual attraction or activity in the relationship. This is why it is not synonymous with "platonic partnership": Harry and Brandon have no sexual attraction; Mulder and Scully end up in a sexual relationship; Riki and Guy start out in a sexual relationship almost while still children. Were Achilles and Patroclus having sex? The fact that the unanswerability of this question across 2500 years of debate has not diminished Western Civilization's devotion to the story demonstrates how truly irrelevant the question is.
* It is not defined by the sexual orientation of the partners: Harry and Brandon are straight; Riki and Guy... are not; Xena and Gabrielle are "thespians."
* It is not defined by legal status: the Shaws were married; Patroclus is Achilles's "guest friend" (a formally understood role); Holmes and Watson just lodge together sometimes (and Watson married someone else).
* It is not defined by its health or success: Schmendrick and Molly share a harmonious life for decades; Harry kills Brandon in a fit of pique; Cathy and Heathcliff are... well...
* It is not, like "domestic partnership" benefits, defined by living together and/or sharing finances: the Woolfs did; Cece and Hilary do sometimes; Kirk and Spock only do when they're working on the same ship; Frodo and Sam spend many decades divided by a mystical sea journey.
Yet Boston partnership is a specific, definable thing. It is a primary relationship based first and foremost on being friends, and many relationships are not this type of partnership.
Examples of not Boston partnerships:
(Your reality, of course, may differ.)
* Buffy, Willow, Xander (So close, but as much as they are the primary stable supports in each other's lives, they never quite reach the point of acknowledging it. Each is looking for "the partner," the one Buffy will be ready for when she's a fully baked cookie.)
* Hawkeye and B.J. in M*A*S*H (Close to Boston partners in Korea but only because war thrust them together. In the end, they'll go home to California and Maine and be secondary friends.)
* Mal and Zoe in Firefly (Classic bff, close, loyal, but the primary partner is Wash.)
* Blake and Avon (Never acknowledge the primary role they clearly have in each other's lives. In other words, they're not quite "friends.")
* John and Aeryn from Farscape (Friends sometimes, but founded on the trepidation and salvation of romance)
* Steed and Emma from The Avengers (She will go back to Peter eventually.)
* Weiß Kreuz ("Just friends, sir," as Margaret said of Frank.)
* Ash and Shorter from Banana Fish (classic bff)
* Adama and Tigh from BSG (classic bff)
* Kagetora and Naoe from Mirage of Blaze (pure high passion)
* Kusaka and Akizuki from Winter Cicada (classically in love)
* Anotsu and Magatsu from Blade of the Immortal (Bff: they save each other's lives, but with a clear understanding that their individual lives run separately.)
* Anotsu and Makie from Blade of the Immortal (Their paradigm, while atypical, is importantly based in traditional gender assumptions about erotic love. They are friends, though, and the longer they are together, the more Boston-partner-like they become. This is a common trajectory for long-term, healthy romances. Most couples by their 50th anniversary are probably Boston partners, regardless of how they started out. As Mary Wollstonecraft observed, in marriage, "Friendship or indifference inevitably succeeds [sexual] love" (Vindication ch. 2). Just like our sexuality, our relationships shift and evolve.)
Conclusion
The concept that friendship can be a primary relationship matters. The basic possibility of many people's happiness depends on our recognition of the legitimacy of this paradigm of love, as surely as it rests on validating gay love. There's an episode of Boston Legal in which Alan laments that our society too loosely throws around the words "love" and "best friend" until they become almost meaningless: "People walk around today calling everyone their best friend. The term doesn't have any real meaning anymore." But a best friend, a true Friend (whether sex is involved or not), is as precious as any lover, and the more we dilute the idea of Friendship-- the longer we insult it with the modifier "just"--the more we undermine the life-defining power of love. "I love you, Denny," says Alan. "You are my best friend."
Note:
[1] Lewis contends, "We are tempted to treat 'courtly love' as a mere episode in literary history.... In fact, however, an unmistakable continuity connects the Provençal love song... with that of the present day. If the thing at first escapes our notice, this is because we are so familiar with the erotic tradition of modern Europe that we mistake it for something natural and universal and therefore do not inquire into its origins. It seems to us natural that [romantic] love should be commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence." (The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1958. p. 3)
