Boston Partnership: A Defense of Primary Friendship
"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
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Boy, dear God, do I know the feeling!
Thanks for your thoughtful response (and for reading "Love in a Finite Place"!). Your response calls for an essay in itself, but for now I'll reply as I can here.
But language lives through people, and if there's no demand, there won't be a suply, so I'm inclined to believe that the lack of terminology means there simply aren't enough people who would be interested in friendship-based life commitment, or in calling it that way.
This is an insightful point that brings up many complex issues. My most (over)simplified response is that I disagree. And I think the fact that you think this is the case is an illustration of why I'm writing this essay.
It's true that most human societies I'm aware of (now or historically) don't have much of a category for "partnering with friends." I suspect a large part of the reason for that is that in traditional societies (and the modern societies that inherited their structures), families were big and relations often lived close, so one's closest social circles were based on family relationships: parents, siblings, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, and spouses, in-laws. One's closest experiential "friends" were mostly drawn from these people because they were the people one lived most closely with, and to define them as "friends" wouldn't be necessary because one would already have convenient, socially definable roles based on biological or legal family relationships.
This is changing with modern times because fundamental social units are changing to accommodate changing technologies. Families are smaller and more spread out. People spend less time with them. Basing social units on the need to produce and support a lot of children is no longer crucial in the developed world. So people spend more time with non-related friends. We begin to see more of a vocabulary for "friend" as "family," as in Buffy: the Scooby gang is more their family than most of their "real" family members; they talk about this. In Rent, they refer to their group of friends as a "family." As a social trend, this is new, but it makes sense. So, too, with gay marriage. We've never had that either, except as an aberration--but we've never had a model of marriage till recently that wasn't mostly based on reproductive socioeconomic units. It doesn't mean there aren't a lot of gay people who feel a deep need to get married; it's just a new social situation.
So I don't think the issue is that people (by and large) don't naturally partner with "friends"; it's more that "friend" was also something else that was easier to name. In the Mahabharata it's "brother." In The Seventh Seal, it's "knight" and "squire." In The X-Files, it's "partner," in the professional sense. (I might also note that until 15-20 years ago, we didn't really have the word, "partner," to define the marriage-type relationship we mean now. It doesn't mean that people didn't have them or want them.)
Some societies have had special vocabulary for friends, like Patroclus as Achilles's "guest friend."
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