1.Crushed
I still remember the night I met Liza. I was twenty-two, it was a Monday, and it was raining. In my hand, a piece of paper where I had written her address. It was damp and falling apart at the creases where I had unfolded and refolded it, nervously checking the name of the street and the number of the flat.
“So this is the kitchen.” She swept her arms theatrically in a semi-circle. She pointed to a battered-looking fridge and explained that each of us would have our own shelf. I remember noticing the tattoos that peeped out from under her sleeve, and the hot pink streak in her hair. She was older than me, in her late twenties, and seemed to inhabit a world I only ever felt on the outside of, peering in. She had a way of meeting my eye that made me feel exposed, a way of talking that was very urgent, as if she might have something to hide. As we walked through the rooms in the flat, painted bright blues and purples and pinks, I saw the collections of shells and crystals on the mantelpieces, and photographs tacked on the wall, and wanted to be in their world. As I walked up the stairs to the bedroom, I noticed the fabric of her tights was fraying at the heel, and I could see the skin through the weave. Tiny pinpricks of vulnerability. It made me almost blush, this nakedness between us.
I have thought about that moment many times over the years. The hair, the shells, the tights. The thrill I felt following her up the stairs. The feeling of absolute rightness I had standing next to her, as if I had finally come home. I thought about it recently when reading a newspaper column that described falling in love at first sight as falling “for a fantasy”: “time shows the reality is very different.”1 This is the common and sensible way to think about love at first sight. As a projection, as an escape, as falling for someone you have imagined, rather than an imperfect, ordinary mortal. Take a breath, the advice runs. But I didn’t take a breath. I fell in love with Liza straightaway. Though perhaps what I really fell in love with was the person I wanted to be next.
I didn’t realize other women have these electrifying moments. I thought it was my own foolishness. Or perhaps, since the coup de foudre is such a feature of romantic love and rarely studied outside that context, that I might not be as straight as I thought. But recently I read the philosopher Gillian Rose’s autobiography, in which she described the first moment she set eyes on her great friend Yvette. It was Brighton Station, the 1980s. Rose was in her forties, Yvette, sixty-five. The older woman was pacing up and down the platform wearing green tights and smiling to herself about some private joke. “I knew,” admitted Rose, that “I was in the presence of a superior being.”2
These moments undo us. “I just remember being very, very, what’s the word, enamored with her, I thought she was an amazing person,” says Stella Dadzie about meeting fellow radical Black organizer Olive Morris for the first time at a gathering of the African Students Union in London in 1977 in her early twenties.3 Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman met when they plonked down next to each other on a squishy sofa at a mutual friend’s Gossip Girl viewing party in Washington, DC, in 2009. They each experienced an instant “ZING!” feeling. It undid them both, this heady mix of desire and sudden infatuation. In their book, Big Friendship, they interview the communications expert Emily Langan, who says “research on attraction can usually be applied to friendship as well … it’s attractiveness in style. It’s attractiveness in aesthetics, sort of the vibe they give off.”4 Desire is desire until our brains help us make sense of what is happening, and the “ZING!” feeling branches off along well-trodden neural pathways into a more recognizable narrative. But in that initial moment, it is all confusion and overwhelm and unassailable attraction: “Do you want to be this person’s lover? Their best friend? Their spouse? Their creative collaborator?”
Sometimes I ask myself if I ever got over that initial moment, or if I was always wonder-struck by Liza. We were friends for less than a year. It was a friendship that burned very bright and then, like a dying star, exploded. I moved out of my parents’ house, where I was living after finishing university, and into her flat. I felt new in London and new in life. I had friends from school and university, but I also wanted to shake off those more cosseted worlds. I wanted adventure, I wanted to dare myself. And in her, there was something thrilling, she was completely different from anyone I had ever met before.
We sat on her bed in her red-painted room, and ate dinner together—French bread and avocado—and watched Star Trek, and drank white wine out of frosted pink cocktail glasses she had found in the charity shop. We talked for hours, about where we had been and where we were going, about who we loved and who we dreamed of being. She worked as a clairvoyant on premium-rate phone lines advertised in the back of women’s magazines, which was how you found a psychic back then. And soon she was reading my cards too, and teaching me to read hers, so that with the lights dim and the incense curling, it felt as if a mystical conduit had opened up between us. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes Lily Briscoe, sitting with her arm around Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, imagining the pair of them mingled “like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same.”5 For a moment, it felt like this mingling, this complete and alluring affinity, was exactly what Liza and I had achieved.
I remember standing at her dressing table when she was out. I remember it so vividly, the colors so bright and luminous, I suspect I knew I was doing something transgressive, even if she had always told me to go into her room, to borrow her clothes, to sleep in her bed since it was more comfortable than mine. I stood at her dressing table, with its crumbling glittery eyeshadows and open lipsticks, its photo booth pictures, half-burned incense sticks, birth control and broken earrings. A truly grown-up female life. By then, I wore the clothes she gave me, and listened to the CDs she lent me and had developed new tastes for all the things she loved best: dark electronica, Alan Rickman, cheesy Wotsits, feather boas. And I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking: This, this is what I want to be like. Was this friendship or was it fetishization? Were my fantasies about her intense and unrealistic? When I look back, I wonder why I seemed so eager to lose myself to her. I don’t doubt it was necessary, for the lessons it taught me. Just that when the inevitable moment of separation and individuation came, it was painful and tumultuous, as anyone could have predicted. Anyone except me.
* * *
The summer I found the courage to start writing about friendship, I visited a seventeenth-century memorial in Christ’s College in Cambridge. Draped in marble flowers and guarded by fat cherubs, it features two stone portraits joined by a knotted cloth. This is usually a symbol of a married couple. But I already knew this memorial was not dedicated to a husband and wife. It commemorates a friendship. A “beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls, a companionship undivided during thirty-six complete years” between two men, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines. Two Renaissance virtuosos and doctors, they traveled, worked and lived together in the 1600s, and were buried together, their tomb reading, “so that they who while living had mingled their interests, fortunes, counsels, nay rather souls, might in the same manner, in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes.”
Many historians have a ritual they will use to shake themselves out of their complacent twenty-first-century perspectives. When my historian friend Jo sits down at her desk to write about nineteenth-century America, she reminds herself that in this period pigs used to wander the streets of New York. Visiting this memorial was my ritual. Whatever I imagine friendship is today, it is not as it has always been.
Who were Finch and Baines? Were they friends, were they lovers, husbands? They lived toward the end of a period of astonishing intellectual transformation in Europe, later described as the Renaissance, or rebirth. Artists, politicians, scientists and philosophers had rediscovered, via the scholars and artists of the medieval Islamic world, the great works of classical antiquity, and wanted to make its ideals their own. Among those ideas were theories about platonic love that gave rise to a cult of romantic male friendship never seen before or since in the West.
In Aristotle’s high-minded treatise On Friendship, written in the fourth century BCE, men like Baines and Finch found a powerful ideal. Aristotle divided friendship into three tiers. The bottom two tiers were ordinary kinds of friends, which he called friendships of utility and those of pleasure, the only kinds of friendships women were, supposedly, capable of. Friendships of utility were those of the “marketplace,” he wrote, based in mutual help and quid pro quo. Friendships of pleasure were bonds formed through diversion and entertainment, the person you gravitate toward because they make you laugh, or sit next to at the games because you both support the same athlete. But true friendship, wrote Aristotle, was something else. The “perfect friendship,” he wrote, was a bond between two men “alike in virtue.”6 It was based on a full and deep appreciation of each other’s inner qualities and involved a complete merging and mingling of minds. It was, he wrote, as if one soul was shared between two bodies, one heart beating in two breasts. Real friendship, wrote Cicero around three hundred years later, involved such a perfect meeting of desires and opinions, it was as if two minds had become one.7
This is how Baines and Finch saw themselves, and were seen. As disciples of this cult of friendship. Perhaps they were physical lovers. Who knows. They lived in a culture that criminalized homosexuality, yet publicly celebrated these effusive and devoted romantic friendships between men. They strove to be “perfect” friends, according to Aristotle’s definition. And by all accounts, they seem to have succeeded. Another man who believed himself a “perfect” friend was the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, whose essay On Friendship remains a cornerstone of Western writing on the subject. He believed he had found what only a few men in a generation could possibly hope to achieve: the perfect friendship. His essay about his devoted friendship with fellow lawyer and author La Boétie is a soaring depiction of a connection so powerful and transcendent, it was almost impossible to define or describe. In one of the most-quoted lines in the history of Western friendship, he writes: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’”8
“Women,” Montaigne continued, were incapable of this “holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn.”9 They were too superficial, too argumentative, too stupid for such an important relationship, he said. (At this point, I feel duty bound to mention that Montaigne and La Boétie’s supposedly era-defining friendship only lasted for four years, until La Boétie’s early death, and was almost entirely conducted by letter. It was a friendship never tested by the realities of living alongside each other, or working together, or falling out over politics or love. So perhaps even they were not the ideal friends they—and generations of writers after—imagined them to be.)
Montaigne had no doubt that women were the “bad friends,” and he was not alone. The seventeenth-century scientist and poet Margaret Cavendish agreed. She said women’s brains were simply too weak to manage the complex emotional demands of friendship.10 In the misogynistic culture of the time, plays and poems showed women as too inconsistent, too rivalrous and moody to make genuine attachments. And then there was sex. The French nobleman La Rochefoucauld quipped, “the reason why most women are so little affected by friendship is that it tastes insipid when they have felt love.”11
Copyright © 2025 by Tiffany Watt Smith
