Get to a certain point, and the person with whom you’re romantically involved is no longer the person you’re romantic with. While you get dressed up for dinner with friends, spray on perfume to impress friends, pick out meaningful present for friends, light candles for drinks with friends, write lengthy emails to friends, talk under the stars about your hopes and dreams with friends, book city breaks to visit friends and go for leaf-fluttered Sunday walks with friends, your partner is the person with whom you buy bin bags and change duvets.
I am far from alone in lavishing my romantic moments on platonic pals. Even at my most in love, I spent more pinkish golden sunsets and wild winter swims with the women I’d grown up with, than the man I lived with.
Because, as you feed your one-way ticket to death through the barriers of your mid-twenties, you may well notice that the last great adventure is not love, but self-discovery. And there is no better companion along that road than the person who made you all those pasta dinners as your lovers came and went, jobs peaked and troughed, parents disappointed and indulged, and partners were gained and lost. Which is why we save the romance for those with whom we’ve walked through life in companionable, civil, unconsuming friendship.
Firstly, your friends went into this with their eyes open. No oxytocin, rush of hormones or post-coital crushes blinded them to your faults - they chose you because they like you just the way you are. And there aren’t many partners who can say that. Especially for over twenty years. My oldest friend met me as a spherical, side-parted eight-year-old latch-key dweeb who used to sing the harmony parts from West Side Story and ride a two-tone purple bike. And, in some part of my heart, she will forever be the girl in the red tartan puffa jacket who kissed her poster of Robbie Williams every night while wearing coffee shimmer lipstick. It's romantic because we never actually fancied each other. There was no burning passion to go cold and turn to ashes; just friendly romance and adventure.
We rarely criticise our friends’ sexual prowess, stand them up out of revenge, or buy them the clothes we wish they’d wear
Secondly, there is a paper-thin whisper of civility that is never quite broken between friends. Despite all the vomit, hair mascara, Now That’s What I Call Music cassettes and missed trains, they will probably never quite see you at your worst. We save that for our relatives and the people we sleep with. We rarely criticise our friends’ sexual prowess, stand them up out of revenge, buy them the clothes we wish they’d wear or fire arrows of reproach and scorn into their trembling hearts.
Which leads me to the third reason we remain romantic with friends long after the love light putters out with partners - we expect less of them. Few of us define ourselves by our friendships. We don’t pin our hopes for a happy home, future family or glittering career on our friends. We want to share those things with them, of course, but we’re not expecting them to directly contribute towards those dreams becoming real. So it is easy to buy them flowers, make them compilation albums, drive them out of town for a picnic or lend them our jumpers - because we are less likely to be disappointed if things go awry.
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I have plucked the drooping scented heads of elderflowers on hot summer days to make my friends a cocktail. I have spent nights in gently bleeding concentration, needle-pricking out a new suit for a friend to wear at their birthday party. I have danced under the stars until my clothes stuck to me like a shroud, bread-bloated and drunk on boxes of cheap French wine with my friends. I have cried all the way from Runcorn to Rugeley Trent Valley after being waved off by friends who have known me since before I knew how to smoke. From the good luck notes spelled out in tights across my kitchen floor to the bike rides to the sea, they are the most romantic relationships I have ever known.
Tracey Emin’s latest White Cube show may shine withthe neon cry that the last great adventure is you. But, for many of us, the last and lasting love of our lives is friendship. And so we romance friends like stones; hard, heavily and without wearing out.
If you wanna be my lover, it’s up to you to get with my friends. Make it last forever, friendship never ends. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said that.
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Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.