When I read this aloud, I pause, laugh awkwardly, and point out that this clearly wasn’t written for us. My childhood best friend was my first crush. My high school best friend was my worst and longest-lasting crush, all twisted up in the slow-burning and horrible knowledge of what those feelings meant about me. Crushes and puberty, sex, maybe love, maybe marriage—the essay charts it so neatly alongside, but insistently separate from, that friendship. And the question—can the girl “also be” that matured, future thing—assumes this same separation. The intimacies between women, moreover, are relegated to places of retreat. In times of crisis, women escape to their best-friendships for respite and support. But that aspect of escape assumes that the friend is separate from the day-to-day—a temporary shelter rather than a true home.I read out loud the section further down about having “a person.”“Where are these women’s boyfriends?” Lexy asks. “What are they doing in all this?”Then come crushes and puberty, sex, maybe love, and still sometimes marriage. With each milestone, the label can begin to seem like a cute school-age relic. If a best friend is someone whose hair you braided and whom you told about your first kiss, can she also be the woman who keeps the spare keys to your first studio apartment, lets you cry in her arms after a boss threatens to fire you or listens when you tell her, and only her, of a sexual encounter that left you with a bad feeling?
I say “if,” but don’t quite need to. It hits me a few days later. The previous winter, I was working an administrative job in an office. One day, approaching the end of the week and finishing off a large snarl of data entry errors, closing out of my email correspondence with the system specialist, I remarked unthinkingly, “I swear to God, Patricia saves my life every single day—I would marry her in a heartbeat.”Women calling each other “work wives” seems, on the surface, to be about making a mockery out of that relationship, reclaiming themselves and their place in the office, proclaiming the power of women working together. But does it? For who? For which women?
There are a lot of these takes on the internet. In them, it’s always assumed that both women are getting out of the relationship what they want. And perhaps they are, if for both of them that’s the ability to uphold their straight relationship by, ironically, getting from a woman what their man doesn’t provide them—without ever having to question whether they owe that other woman a conversation about what they each want and need to get out of it, thereby undercutting the easy assumptions proffered by heteronormativity. But I haven’t seen any exploring the other possibility: that the friend who gets drawn into the execution of another woman’s heterosexual unhappiness and homosocial desire actually wants more, whether in terms of intimacy or simply acknowledgement. We’ve heard a lot about what it is to be a woman who is unsatisfied in herself and her relationships and turns to another woman for those needs; we haven’t heard the stories of the Other Women. Those stories might reframe these affairs away from the question of loneliness, unhappiness, malaise, and need, and towards a question of labor, consumption, and use. It might help us recognize how when straightness is the assumed default, gestures of queer intimacy get muddled, blurred, and erased amidst all that platonic friendships have been stretched to encompass.The idea that this is what it means to become platonically close with another woman conveniently explains away potential slips into romance.
The problem is societal, the sum total of cultural knowledge poured into our brains from day one, and it can’t be reduced to the individual in any context. When the podcast Call Your Girlfriend promotes one of its sponsors with "PROMO CODE: GIRLFRIEND," the problem isn’t the hosts, it’s the pattern. The same pattern that makes it make sense for the authors of a book titled Work Wife to begin their website bio by explaining that they met “when a mutual frenemy introduced them, suggesting they should be friends because they both, at some point during their college careers, dated (Division III) basketball players.” The same pattern that wants you to salivate a little at the thought of women sending each other nudes, secure in the knowledge that there is a line and it hasn’t been crossed.For queer women, it’s all caution tape. The lines are policed and we are meant to abide.But we don’t. Living is unabiding. The lines are made up and the tape doesn’t matter. Sometimes I still find the crime-scene rubble of growing up a queer girl in places I didn’t expect it. And sometimes I feel too vulnerable, too closed off, too real, and too much like somebody else, like a performance of a whole person that I think I’m supposed to be instead of the barely-a-person that I am, all at once. But at the same time, there’s a stability in knowing and naming what you have—knowing and naming it, like, for real. The ambiguity and the tease and the mess and the maybes are somebody else’s problem.It’s almost an identity crisis, is what it is—the straight-girl girlfriends, the work-bestie work wives. In academia, where I currently live, it’s the same with “partners.” Everyone has a partner. The coy almost-queerness of it: We’re straight but not like that; too serious, too aware, or too intellectual for the juvenile boyfriend/girlfriend terminology. In the whirlwind first weeks of my program, everyone I was introduced to talked about their “partner,” and it was a guessing game every time whether they meant a long-term, serious relationship with another queer person or a long-term, serious relationship with another straight person, but one who wears flannel and cares about justice and reciprocity and shit. These are good, brilliant, connected people—but the uniformity of it, how it integrates so smoothly into the language, like part of a shared shorthand, marks it beyond the individual usage. There’s a sense that the term can distance and disavow straightness, that it can mark one as out of alignment with the world’s heterosexual structure—maybe, if it tries hard enough.But at some point, it’s like: Can we have anything? These omnipresent patterns feel more and more like either a manifestation of or a response to some frantic anxiety. Everything needs to be clouded and uncertain, so that straightness, above all, can be solid and certain. This is a fiction applied over the unruly parts of us like a Band-Aid. To be a woman who loves other women is to be wholly unruly, in that sense. And since the coherence of straightness as default and matter-of-fact can only exist if queerness is not allowed the same stability, queer women must be obscured.I don’t know what the solution is for all of us. For Lexy and I, it starts here: with the satisfaction and comfort of knowing ourselves and our words.“How about wife?” Lexy asks at one point. It’s barely a month until my graduate symposium, and it looks like she’ll be flying in.“I’ll pretend you didn’t just say that.” I sigh down the phone. “They’ll just think I mean ‘business partner’.”“With that haircut? No. Lover?”“I’m hanging up on you.”I don’t.For queer women, it’s all caution tape. The lines are policed and we are meant to abide.