TradingCardKind

Allen's Hummingbird (Selasphorus alleni), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, Western U.S.

Dragon Nilakshi art doll WIP

This is a difficult question! I think it taps on a lot of things I've been thinking about lately as my friends and I navigate relationships and lack thereof. What does it mean to need something? What is at the end of the day the difference between a friend and a lover? I think in some ways what we "need" is not a particular discrete category of person to slot into our lives so much as a series of actions and reciprocations that can be provided by another person irrespective of whether we would consider them a friend or lover. Lately I've been thinking that the language we use to describe these categories of relationship are at best only useful for offhand rapid social references rather than necessarily meaningfully discrete on their own.

I think it's a common cliche that the best s/o's a person can have is a friend beyond all else, and I do think it's a cliche because it's true. I also think there's a passion between the best of friends that is comparable to that between lovers. I feel as I've grown older the boundaries between the two categories have grown porous, so that the difference between my friends and my partner is just Whether We Have Sex, and even then...?

For me, I spent a long time not particularly interested in having an s/o. I went on dating apps to meet interesting people and hang out with them and sex was nice but not really the Primary Thing I was looking for. I wanted fun conversation and I wanted to explore the city with people whose schedules I didn't have to wait for. If the person I met up with ended up being a friend or eventually became an s/o, great! But I wasn't really trying to find a person so much as someone who'd be willing to do certain things with me, if that makes sense? I wanted someone I could talk to about meaningful things, about questions I had about navigating the world, to share jokes with, all of which could be done with either friends or lovers. I also, occasionally, wanted to 69 with someone WHICH ALSO COULD BE DONE BY FRIENDS OR LOVERS...

So I dunno. I didn't really "decide" that what I needed in my life was a lover or that my partner was someone I "needed." We never even officially asked each other out, technically? We just like... kept talking and never really stopped. My partner and I made each other laugh all the time. Just the ugliest laughter imaginable. We talked constantly about every topic that came to mind and we found each other interesting. The distinction between new friends excited to get to know each other and new lovers doing the same felt completely identical to me. Just that based on social scripts, the former is supposed to be sexless, which reality kept telling me wasn't the case (I've had immensely erotic experiences with friends with whom I shared a mutual disinterest in ever becoming lovers)! Whenever we fought, we found the absence of each other's presence in our lives was more painful than the initial hurt and we apologized because we missed each other's stupid jokes and we kept seeing things we wanted to talk about. That's also the same between friends and lovers. We've had really, really dark points in our relationship where we came very close to breaking up, and even then we talked about how we would navigate the friendship that would ensue because we did not want to stop talking to each other. I think that's also the case regardless of friends and lovers, the desire to plot out a continual relationship even if there's some kind of drastic change.

I don't know. I don't have a good answer for you beyond paragraphs of wordvomit, sorry! I think love is found everywhere, from friends or lovers or sometimes even from benign strangers, and the categories are often porous, and sometimes it's worth asking not "who" you want in your life but "what."