One of my favorite moments in a friendship

is when we learn that we're both hug people, or both kind of touchy-feely with our friends in general. This can take a little while to occur. It is always better to err on the side of not touching people, because consent and body issues must always be respected. As such, this moment might not happen the first few times you hang out. You might need an excuse the first time, like taking a picture together--suddenly arms are around waists and this barrier is broken. Later, when you tease him and he pouts, you feel emboldened enough that you can hug him to cheer him up again. You're not sure what to expect, because it's your first hug, and many people are tentative about first hugs. But as his arms slide firmly around your back and you snuggle in close, cheek to cheek, you let out a small sigh of comfort. He is a hugger. You step out of your hug and he says, "You give really good hugs." "So do you," you reply. You take every opportunity throughout the rest of the night to repeat this full-bodied hug, and take to standing with your arms around one another's shoulders. It is a wonderful night. 

On the capitalism of friendship

"Whereas closed romantic relationships are mutual slavery, in friendship a free capitalism reigns. Favors are exchanged for favors. Secrets are exchanged for secrets. Balance must be guarded tightly, lest suspicion arise. Your time and resources limit the amount of friendship you may buy from the market of human relations; you may only have a few deep relations or several more superficial ones. If you become closer with somebody in particular, other relations immediately suffer. Most of the time, there is someone more important for you than you are for her, and vice versa.

"Often friendship relations are hierarchical--you have a best friend, second best friend, and so on. Different social hierarchies also penetrate these relations...Friendship is a continuous battlefield, where you must earn your place...You must earn your friends every day, and you may lose your social status overnight...With time, these relations become more stable, but low-intensity warfare does not mean peace...Loneliness means that you have been defeated in the war of human relations. You have put too much of yourself in one or two main relationships that failed...

"...We who desire the end of capitalism often fail to see how deeply its model of action is embedded into human society. There is no fundamental difference between that and an exchange that involves money and barter. If friendship and love is about barter as well, what hope is there to get rid of capitalism?"

--Antti R., Letters IV

(via come correct)

Relevant to my life for two separate points:

A) Because EY and I always tease JA about being a bad friendship investment. (She's not. She's just electronic-forms-of-communication-challenged.)

B) Because there are a couple of friendships in my life that I feel...off-balance in right now, like one side or the other is giving or taking too much, like we're struggling to find a middle ground at which to happily meet. There are other relationships I want to do more to cultivate into a fullness they're currently lacking. Yeah, friendship is probably capitalism, but if we're not getting out what we're putting in, then capitalism is hurting us as much here as it does anywhere else.

I love it when my friends cash in on offers I don't expect them to take me up on.

I see how that could be a bad thing, but let me give two recent examples:

Sometime early in the summer, I thought about how my friend SW was taking a year off and living at home in West Virginia. 'West Virginia's not super-far from DC,' I thought. 'I should let her know that I'd be cool with her coming to visit for a weekend sometime if she needs a break from home.' I wrote on her Facebook wall to this effect, but I'm not gonna lie--I was surprised when she actually emailed me months later saying she wanted to visit. We had SUCH a great time when she was here and I was so glad I'd decided to extend that offer, even if I wasn't particularly expecting her to take me up on it.

During Sandy, I kept checking in on my friend who lives in Arlington because I knew way more people on NoVa had lost power than in DC. When he still didn't have power by this afternoon, I told him that if he and our other friend and his housemate wanted to come hang out at my place when metro re-opened, they were welcome to. He didn't text me back then, so I was like, eh, well, I guess that's just something people think people say, but when he called me later to say they were coming, I was so excited! We hung out catching up for a few hours, I made dinner, and now, like the 20-somethings we are, we're all sitting in my living room on our computers while they make use of my good electricity. 

It makes me feel good when my friends know that my offers aren't empty. I like being able to be here for people, as a mini-vacation, a source of company and electricity, an editor, a pair of listening ears, whatever...   

How the way we show bestfriendship changes as we get older

When we were kids, showing who was your best friend was easy. You spent every moment possible together. You shared even your favorite lunchtime snacks. You went through the whole ordeal of asking your mom to go to their house on the weekend even though you knew she'd make you clean your room first. When we were kids and some grown-up person would ask us, "Who's your best friend?", there was one clear and decisive answer.

Then we got a little older. Say, middle school and early high school. Suddenly there were these things called telephones and we wanted to be on them all day. It wasn't enough to perhaps be in every class all day with our closest friends--we now had to call them as soon as we got home and again after dinner to...do very little other than hog up the phone line. SH and I used to watch Friends together and take the deepest joy from being able to laugh at the same things at the same time. We used to listen to the radio and sing with each other. We'd do whatever we'd be doing if we were alone, except that we were together (but not really). [I just realized how much of a precursor these activities were to my later/current internet-heavy lifestyle, always talking to someone, yet simultaneously #foreveralone.] By this age, your best friends have become those people whose mere presence comforts you.

This continues through high school. Now you've got a friend group. This is the big leagues--it's three or four or seven people you can count on to hang out with. If you're going to the movies, or the mall, or to play mini-golf when you get out of school early after taking your AP Gov exam, it's with these guys. You do all the same extracurricular activities, so not only do you see each other at school all day, you also see each other afterschool, and then call each other to figure out the Calc homework and your lives. These are the friends you have deep serious important life conversations with for the first times. This has begun the era of seeking advice from friends, advice about that person you're interested in, what class you should take, what schools you're thinking about applying to, how to convince your Mom to let you do X-thing-you-know-she-won't-approve-of, etc. This is when your friends become partially responsible for keeping the pieces of you in order when you're freaking out. This is the era when your friends have started to surpass your family in terms of importance to your daily functioning as a social being. You show this by passing notes and lying to your mom to hang out with them.

In college, friendship begins to revolve around food and proximity. Your closest friends are maybe your roommates or the guys down the hall. They're probably the people you can call on to eat dinner together on a semi-daily (or actually daily) basis. They're the people you'll wait to go to events for even though being late is your biggest pet peeve. They're the people you have impromptu dance parties in your common room with. The people you don't mind overhearing conversations with your parents. The people with whom doing homework together becomes having incredible conversations til 3am and THEN starting the paper you have due tomorrow. They're the people you agree to stay up all night with for moral support when you don't have anything to do. They're the people that you know will come to your peformance. They do all of the advising and pieces-putting-back-together that your high school friends did, except on a higher level because this is real life shit. Your willingness to put pants on and do things with them in person, or let them come over to your hideously dirty room, talk soothingly to them when they're sobbing, let them borrow your shit for indeterminate periods of time, and to act normal in front of their parents are how you show that you care about them.

From what I have gathered so far of post-grad life, you show that you care about people in the real world by making and actually keeping Skype dates with them. By fitting them into your otherwise crazy schedule for dinner and/or happy hour if they live in the same city as you. By gchat and Facebook chat. By occasionally picking up your telephone to do something other than text and hearing their voice, which will inevitably make you realize how much you miss them in one knotty ball of want. By planning to buy plane/train/bus tickets to see them. By actually buying them.

But I have recently been introduced to what feels, to me, like it trumps any and all the myriad ways I have shown friendship for someone in the past (besides, perhaps, the not inexpensive roundtrip ticket to Denver I will be buying sometime before March). At its simplest, it means wearing this dress (without the black sash)

and standing in front of a room full of people who mean either very much to my dear friend and once-roommate, MJP, or her soon-to-be-husband, my friend CW. It means helping to organize the bachelorette party and the bridal shower. It means helping her get dressed, making sure her hair and makeup are perfect, and being there to tell her that she looks absolutely stunning, as do the decorations and the place settings. It is staying-up-to-watch-the-sun-rise-for-moral-support-alone on crack.

These are the things it is tangibly. The things it is practically. The things it will be in terms of real world actions and responsibilities.

Intangibly, impractically, in the amorphous world of my feelings, it may be the highest honor that has ever been bestowed unto me. It is you-are-significant-enough-to-who-I-am-and-how-I-got-here-that-I-want-you-to-be-beside-me-as-I-declare-that-I'll-spend-the-rest-of-my-life-doing-this-new-thing, specific-role-ified. It never occurred to me before that wedding parties are as much about love as are the weddings themselves until she asked those seven words and I started to cry. We all know how I feel about weddings and marriage for me, but that doesn't lessen my desire to want to be part of her wedding at all--she's the happiest I've ever seen her, and to be chosen to be a part of making that official? I think it might be the pinnacle of bestfriendship-expression.    

Friendship is like a snowstorm

It’s crazy, because I don’t even know when you became so important to me. It’s like watching a snowstorm. You see the flakes falling, but you don’t realize how they’re adding up. Then suddenly your whole lawn is covered. All these little things have added up, and you’re my snowstorm, baby.

--wordsthat-speak

(via Free Bird)

Soooo, this is basically how I feel about every single person I call a friend. Especially about everyone I call a good friend. In an almost overwhelming manner about anyone I call a best friend. If you mean something to me, I promise you that I've had some moment where we've had some conversation or done some thing together and I've stopped to think, 'Hmmmm, we're close enough for this? Evidently we're close enough for this. I'm okay with us being close enough for this, but I am nonetheless surprised.' As you become increasingly important to me, I try to look back and chart how we got to where we are, but I can never remember. It's as if it has always been this way, when I know that logically, it hasn't. Your snow covers my world and I can't quite remember what it looked like before the blizzard. 

An update on my real-world friendships

Reblogged from Choosing Pancakes

That was me whenever I thought about my post-grad life before graduation and for my first few weeks of living in this city. I was stressed out about how I've never made a friend out of anything but proximity (and forcibly inserting myself into the life of a person whom I think is cool, evidently, which evidently has worked in the past) and I didn't understand how to bridge the gap between meeting people and befriending them. 


...Soooo I'm still making friends out of proximity, haha. This time, proximity being my office. I went to Jazz in the Gardens at the sculpture gardens near the National Archives with some people from work (none of whom I actually knew very well) and met a fellow Princetonian who works in another department! I've gradually been making more and more social visits to my work friends' offices and convincing people that eating alone in their offices when there are literally 300 other hungry people nearby is just silly. This culminated in me hosting a dinner party at my house on Wednesday night. Eight girls from my office--the five that I'm closest to and three that I didn't actually really know, all went to the grocery store with me after work to pick up the ingredients for shrimp fettuccine and cooked and ate and laughed and were merry together. They fawned over my house, too. (Side note: everyone keeps doing that. It makes me really happy.) And afterwards, about half of us went to this little...park is a strong word...more like vacant grassy lot near the office where they show outdoor movies on Wednesday night and watched The Incredibles. One of the girls, whom I hadn't known super well, baked ninja-shaped Incredibles cookies, complete with the red icing and little yellow i's on their chests. It was ADORABLE. 


I am now friends with three of them on Facebook and have one's number. She texted me on Friday night to see if I'd be interested in doing a singles "events and adventures" group with her...uh, duh. So, these developments excite me. 


I've also been hanging out with a decent number of Princetonians: most notably RG, but I've also seen AM once and will see her again Tuesday along with some other 2011s. I went to a concert with DA two weeks ago. I finally saw BK at the Princeton Club of Washington Nationals baseball game event last Sunday, and met/hung out with a Black 2010 guy I hadn't known before (who is unfortunately only in town for the summer). I had dinner with one of my assistant activities chairs from Quad last night (and learned that Ethiopian food is delicious). RP is in town on business for the next few months Mon-Thurs, and I saw her last week and will hopefully see a lot more of her over the next few weeks. MJP was here last week with her program, and when FS was here for the 4th, I saw him, too.


And in all of that hanging out, something has occurred to me: there is something incredibly refreshing about spending time with people who already know you, even if you aren't particularly close. I don't feel like I'm putting on a show for the new friends I'm making in DC or anything--even when I'm socializing with my work friends, I feel like I'm being myself. But still, I am ever in the process of introduction with them, I suppose. It's more stories and backtracking, more "a friend of mine from college" instead of "[name]". It's as if I'm demonstrating who I am and what I'm about, rather than simply living and breathing it like I can with people who already have some established sense of those things. The familiar feeling, combined with the catching up, reminds me that I didn't leave myself behind in all the changes of late. It is wonderful to literally bring the past into the present and watch it still fit. 


(I get to do this to an even higher extent next weekend: TN is coming to stay for two days! This also involves me taking my first paid-time-off day. I feel so fancy. Like, what, I'ma not come to work and you're gonna pay me like I came? What is this awesome world?)


But before you're all, "Omg, Maya, you're living the dream!", I have a confession to make. I'm unsure about the placement of that comma, and my post-college social network is beginning to look a lot like my pre-college social network. For those who aren't familiar with Maya of olde, this means that RG is the only non-White person I'm consistently spending any time with. Also, to the best of my knowledge, everyone I've spent time with is straight. And I don't really know how to remedy either of these issues. My housemates are White, my office is Vanillaville with a spattering of Asian/Indian, and though I know some of the other black recent Princeton grads in the city, RG is the only one I was close to in college. I came to rely on communities of people of color and a collection of individuals who fall outside of normative heterosexual boundaries during my time at Princeton, and I am fiercely adamant that those are not communities that I want to lose. I joined a couple of Meetups for women of color and/or Black women in the DC area and those for LGBT folks in the area, so hopefully some sense of community will come out of that, but from my experience at the Live Soul meetup for Musiq Soulchild, I'm scared that that crowd might be considerably older. So if anyone has any suggestions on that front, I'm all ears. 

I had the best idea of my very short post-grad life today.

And it's already playing out fabulously. This morning while I was deep conditioning my hair, it occurred to me that it has been almost a month since I graduated. I was thinking about what I've done in this first almost-month, and feeling pretty smug: I had witnessed the doctor tell my mother that she's now cancer-free, successfully grilled food at a huge BBQ in my little sister's honor, gone place-to-live hunting, been chosen as my new housemates' first choice, been approved for the lease all by myself with no cosigner, bargain shopped for new home essentials, hung out with a few friends from home, vegged out on my couch for days, moved, unpacked, grocery shopped, made dinners that wowed my housemates and turned into lunches that my coworkers were jealous of, been complimented on my outfit nearly every day by at least one person, had two guys ask for my number while I was walking home from work, and received commendations on my work at work from someone else with my job title and then, through my direct supervisor, from a senior survey researcher who is evidently quite hard to please. My boss said, and I quote, "If you can please [name redacted], you can please anyone at [my company]." I had transitioned fairly painlessly to the 7:30am to 12:30am lifestyle. I'd experimented with my hair to find cute styles for work. I'd cleaned my entire house from kitchen to bedroom. Was there anything I hadn't done? 

And then I thought of all the people I hadn't talked to, and my sense of accomplishment dwindled a little. I was keeping in regular contact with KS (text and AIM) and EY (Skype and text). I'd talked to SO (gchat) and DG (facebook chat) a few times, JB (gchat) and JA (an actual phone call) once. But they're a tiny fragment of the people who are important to me from my life at Princeton. They're certainly not the only people to whom I meant it when I said that we'd keep in touch. 

So how to fix this? I could be like RG and call people randomly, but, while I appreciate that, it can feel a little intrusive. (When did that happen? Phone calls used to be what I lived for. Oh, the days of middle and high schools.) Okay, so not random phone calls. Or, yes random phone calls, but only to people with whom I'm close enough that intrusion is welcome.

Then I thought about all the people I saw on gchat/Facebook chat/Skype every day and didn't click on their names to have a conversation with them. It's like there's some line I established somewhere between people I'm allowed to just talk about anything/nothing/whatever with, to shoot the proverbial shit with, and some people I have to have something to say to in order to message. As no sooner had that thought completed itself than I realized the degree to which it is utter and complete bullshit. And it's the exact brand of bullshit that causes people to never ever keep in touch. 

I have a simple message for the world. Though I don't like it as an initial message on dating sites, between friends or close acquaintances who haven't talked in a while, "Hey! What's up?!" is something to say. "How'd moving to [insert city here] go?" is something to say. "How's your new job?" is something to say. "How are you entertaining yourself before grad school?" is something to say. Yes catch-up conversations can feel a little interview-y, but would you rather feel like you're asking too many questions or have to have a two hour conversation next year at reunions because you haven't spoken at all? In reality, you're not going to want to waste two hours of partying, which means you could never have that two hour conversation (which will need to become longer and longer as more time passes). 

So, new rule: If I see someone that I call a friend (rather than someone I call "this girl/guy I know") pop up on gchat or Facebook chat and I haven't communicated with this friend in some form in the last two weeks, I must message them just to say hey. To see what's up. To shoot the shit. I'm going to say hi because there's no reason not to, and every reason to. The best way to stay in touch...is to stay in touch. You don't have to play catch-up if you never leave "the know". So I want to stay there with as many people as I can.

Since this afternoon, I've had conversations with four people that I care about, but might not have talked to for months or longer if I thought I needed something specific to say to them. I feel so plugged in to the world right now. I didn't realize how much I felt like I was living on an island away from everyone I know. But just like that, in ten minutes of catching up, I remember all the bridges we've mad and feel so connected. The simple joys of just saying hey.              

Went to Applebees with RB (who I've mentioned recently) last night

And it was simultaneously great and really weird. It's like, she used to be one of my closest friends in the entire world. Like, spend all day together at school and after school (because we were in all the same clubs, usually as President and Vice President), then spend hours on the phone together when we got home best friends. Like we talked extensively about whether she should go on her first date with the guy she's now been dating for over six years best friends. Like knew all the sordid details of each other's complicated familial lives best friends. 

And then we went away to college less than half an hour from one another and became people who saw each other maybe once during the school year and a few times in the summer, and we almost never talked in between seeing each other. When we hang out, we instantly click again and the conversation flows naturally and I feel all warm and snuggly inside, but those hang-out sessions are few and far between.

It's...strange when every time you hang out with a person that was once one of your closest friends, you're having a catch up session. Having catch-up sessions forces you to confront the idea that you've become "old friends" rather than "friends," that you do not, in fact, know what is up in one another's lives anymore. How do you get to that point with people? How does that happen? Now you're all grown up and different and facing all kinds of new issues than the kind you used to tackle together. You used to say "See ya tomorrow" nonchalantly, and now it's long hugs because you don't know where you'll see each other again.

Saying goodbye to your friends at the end of high school is one thing. You'll see each other again on breaks and in summers; you'll always be home for something. You live there. Saying goodbye to your college friends is another thing, especially at a place like Princeton. Our alumni tend to cluster in major cities (the two most major of which are within weekend-trip distance) and our Reunions are the biggest parties known to the hemisphere. I will see these people again. 

Saying goodbye to your friends from home when you're moving away from home is a completely different thing. It's saying I'm never going to be home for this long ever again. It's saying, "If you're ever in DC...". It's making far-fetched plans to travel to Spain together at some point. It's saying, "I miss this," knowing we just have to keep on missing it. It's not saying, but knowing, that we could very well never see each other again. But like the other big goodbyes, it hopes against its own finality.   

But as much as I want to say it's impossible

to let go of a place (and/or people) that made you who you are, I can't without feeling dishonest. To some degree, I have already done this. I think about the people who were my best friends in high school: TJ, PD, and RB. These guys were my whole world. We were on the phone for hours every day, hung out after school and on weekends at each others' houses, passed notes back and forth in the hallways... I would have been hard pressed to tell someone about myself without talking about them. Those friendships and the way I developed while I was in that tiny group was, at the time, entirely indicative of who I am. If you'd asked me then, I couldn't imagine not being friends with them any more at X point in the future.

...And now I barely even talk to any of the three of them. PD and I stayed the closest throughout the past four years, but even that closeness is like, months and months of not talking and then a very long and emotional catch up session, often in person. TJ and RB and I are still all totally cool with each other. We hang out in groups when we're home and it's really easy to fall back into familiarity with each other, even as we change, but that bond we had is gone. The people we were then are gone. Erased. Forever. Changed immutably by the new places we've gone, experiences we've had, people we've come to know and love and define ourselves according to our relationships with. I don't regret being the girl I was when that was my life, but I also wouldn't want to go back there for a second, even if it meant regaining those friendships and that experience, even though they once occupied nearly the entirety of my heart. 

There are friends from high school with whom I did keep in fairly regular contact during high school: TN, SH, and FO. TN and SH are the two people in the world I've been closest to for the longest period of time, and though our friendships have gone through lots of changes over the years, I'm pretty damn confident they're going to be my friends for the rest of my life, though the contexts and contents of our friendships will change. FO and I didn't really become friends until after high school, when I was already in the process of undergoing substantive Princetonian change, so he fit right into my "new me" life with all of my friends from school.

And then I changed from the person I thought I needed to be to be a Princetonian (aka "Freshman Year Maya") to the person Princeton actually made me. Remember, in the acknowledgements of my thesis, I thanked the University as a whole "for introducing me to myself and allowing me to reintroduce myself". In so many ways, from what's on my head to what's in it, from what I wear to where I am, from intellectual development to more intimate ones, I feel in this moment as though I was never in my life as "me" as I am now, as these four years have made me. 

...The only thing that keeps tripping me up is this: I don't feel like four years ago, when my family sat on the bleachers at Oakcrest High School for my graduation like we did for my little sister on Thursday, I would have told you that I *didn't* feel like myself. Perhaps, had I already absorbed sociological/psychological language, I would have said that I often felt like a passive participant in the construction of my self. If I was feeling particularly introspective, I could have told you I didn't feel like I was my WHOLE self with anyone. But even that didn't make me feel like who I was wasn't "real", even if that realness was separated into bits and pieces to be shared in different spaces. So if that self was real and this self is real, but somehow to a higher degree than the old self because I'm actively working to make and maintain the person I am now, then there's no way of knowing whether in 2, 5, or 10 years I'll still be this self. Well, okay, actually it's a pretty sure bet I'll be different in a lot of ways, but will I look back on these old blog posts and still recognize myself in the person I am now? I don't know.

And that terrifies me. Not because I'm afraid of change or because I absolutely love the person I am now (though I am pretty happy with myself, if I'm being honest), but because I don't want what happened with my friendships with TJ, PD, and RB to happen with my friendships with KS and EY. I'm scared that my deepest closest most intimate friendships are the ones that are most vulnerable to falling apart when I undergo deep intimate change. I mean, it makes sense, right? When the whole of who you are is wrapped up in this friendship and then the whole of who you are changes...I think only time can tell whether the friendship is strong enough to stand the change.

But you know, I think there is one thing that I share with my college friends, both the closest of the close and just the people I'm good friends with (hell, and even with all the random internet people who read this blog), that I didn't have with even my closest friends from high school. It's a word I toss around in the classroom a lot. It's a word that interests me when you put an identity category in front of it or the word "politics" behind it. With these people, I feel authentic. I don't feel like I'm taking on roles I don't want or playing up some aspect of myself to fit in...I feel like I just kind of came along and laid myself bare on a table or something and they were like cool and rolled with it. I don't ever feel like I'm frontin', and though I would never have been comfortable using the word frontin' four years ago, I couldn't have said that about the vast majority of my closest friends from home at the time.  I was able to be vulnerable with those people like I am able to be vulnerable with these people, but not wholly, not in all the ways I needed to be. I wasn't able to be strong when I needed to be with them either, sometimes. I had to pretend sometimes, like I don't know. Like I don't want to in the future. Like I refuse to in the future.

So, am I going to stay absolutely as close with my best friends from college as we were in college for the rest of ever? Of course not. That's absurd. We're in different places and leading separate lives and off on our own great adventures. We're going to figure out how people in "the real world" make friends and make new best friends in our respective places. I certainly wouldn't be upset if EY and I talk every day like we did when she studied abroad junior fall, but I'm certainly not going to demand it either. The demand I will make is that I never want to fall out of touch with the people who mean the most to me right now. I never want to not know where they are or what they're up to; I don't want it to be weird if I call/text/email/facebook/tweet them on a whim. I also want to let myself grow in ways only DC can make me grow, like Princeton made me grow in ways only Princeton could have made me grow. There's no point in starting a new chapter if you don't give it the opportunity to affect you deeply, right?       

I'm going to miss easy physicality with people.

I don't remember why this came up, but I clearly remember saying this during the wee-hours-of-the-morning drunken conversation KS, EY, and I had the night before last: 

"You know who I kissed twice last night? CB. You know who I'm not attracted to at all? CB."

I also remember KS being confused by my shirtless snuggles with MT and my having kissed him the week before (#truthdarekissorcody #middleschooldrinkinggamenight #dranglerproblemsawesomesauce), so I decided not to mention having also held MT and JD's hands that night or been in a cuddle/feel-up puddle with DS, SW, and RW the night before. When you're with a group of people that will get up and run around the house naked on a moment's notice, touching each other isn't always the biggest deal. But even when I'm not talking about PQCSS members or that kind of touching, it's still really easy to be physically affectionate with a lot of the people I'm (sometimes not even particularly) close to on this campus: for example, there are at least two guys in my eating club who I usually initiate interaction with by running my fingers through their hair and massaging their scalps. We used to get a small Asian female member who has since graduated to walk on our backs, and massage circles are still quite prevalent. It's not uncommon for people to sit on other people's laps for no particular reason; we're quite cuddly. 

And I thrive on that. Granted, I don't have that kind of easy physicality with KS or EY, and they are the people I'm "closest" to overall on this campus, but there are few other people I call close friends that I would hesitate to put my arm around in daily life. ChoosingPancakes was entertained by the fact that my strongest love language on this quiz we both took was physical touch, because that was one of her weakest. I don't just mean sex or sexual-ish touches when I say I value physical touch as one of the strongest ways to show me you care about me. It can be little things, like hugs that feel like you mean it, or not feeling the need to jerk your knee away if it meets mine under a table or on a couch, or an arm around a shoulder for no reason at all. It's rubbing my back when you're comforting me while I'm crying. It's me being in your space/you being in mine not being a big deal. That's how friends should be, in my opinion, but I know that a lot of people have much stricter restrictions on even light physicality than I do and try to respect them (though that sort of goes out the window when I'm drunk, oops). For me, it can certainly also mean being able to do things like hold hands and snuggle in various degrees of undress and kiss in front of a room of cheering friends on a dare without it being a big deal, but again, I recognize and respect that most people have lines they draw in this arena.

What worries me, though, is when I get to wondering if I'll ever have this kind of easy physicality with a group of people ever again. I had it for a while in high school--one of my fondest memories from sophomore year will always be laying on the floor in PD's living room watching Pirates of the Caribbean with my head in the small of TJ's back and him telling me he would be my pillow anytime--and I have it here in this amazing community of 'Dranglers (who mean more to me than I may ever be able to express), but conceptualizations I have of the "real world" suggest that maybe it's something about youth and chosen communities, that grown folks don't do that.  I feel like in some respects, adults revert to like middle school rules about what touching someone means, and it makes me sad. 

Side note: Did I ever tell you how when I was holding PD's hand at an Applebees once to comfort her while she was telling me about a breakup and some dude came up to our able to ask if we were lesbians? I both appreciate the acceptance of this as a possibility by our unknown audience and am mad that two people interacting with each other physically must be presumed to be romantically involved.

If being okay with you touching me and vice versa is a quality of youth, then I want to stay young for as long as I can while I grow up. How do I find other people who want to stay young in the same way? I don't necessarily need people who will laugh at bad porn together on a giant television in the middle of the night or play shirtless ruits (though that would be AWESOME), but I want people who understand that the unequivocal best way to watch a movie is while snuggling, people who won't read anything more into me laying my head on their shoulder than I find your presence enjoyable. But I feel like that kind of easy physicality only comes from like, spending all your time together in intensely social subcultural spaces, and that seems difficult to recreate in the 9-5, separate addresses, lack of communal spaces world. I feel like if I want someone to replace the guys whose hair I like to fluff, I should get a pet. Sigh. 

Growing up stinks. I want to change it. But this revolution can't just be personal...

“she's a friend of mind. she gather me, man. the pieces i am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” 

-toni morrison

This is how I feel about a certain best friend of mine on campus.

Sternberg’s Love Theory

freedom fighter posted this image a while ago, and I bookmarked it because it makes me think. It makes me think deeply and a lot. It makes me contemplate my relationships and my choices and my definitions of things and it makes me ask myself what I'm looking for in my life. It's rare that I come across an image that seems to actually be worth a thousand words, but this one warrants deep exploration.

Love is a word I have so much trouble with. I want to use it in relation to so many things, but sometimes saying it is incredibly serious and sometimes it's not. I don't always know what kind of love I think I feel or am definitely feeling or want to feel. But this might be a helpful (if somewhat problematic in its own ways) way to conceptualize it.  The triangles don't have to be equilateral--the length corresponds to how important that concept is in the relationship.

Nonlove doesn't register on any of these three axes. That seems fair. I don't think you can have something worthy of the word "love" in any form that doesn't have any of these features.

Romantic love is defined as featuring intimacy and passion, which also seems fair to me. I can imagine that many of my friends would balk at commitment not being included in that model, but I for one am perfectly (in fact, perhaps even more) comfortable with romantic love outside of long-term commitment. JB would argue that monogamy is in and of itself a commitment, which I suppose is true in the most basic of senses. I, for one, have never been one to need to fight potential suitors (and/or...suitresses?) off with a stick, which results in monogamy as a general condition of my life even when the situation does not call for it. I have at this point always been functionally monogamous, if not ideologically monogamous, so I guess I don't really see the ability to hook up with other people as this significant thing I'm giving up when I get into a relationship. Regardless of any level of mutual ownership (or partnership if that construction bothers you) engendered by monogamy, however, I don't think it implies any sort of longevity in terms of the commitment by definition. It's a fragile commitment, one that exists between individuals temporally but which is not committed to itself--it's almost an obligation rather than a commitment, and to me, that's why commitment isn't on the triangle for romantic love. 

Friendship is intimacy without passion or commitment. This makes sense too--our friends are among the persons we're most intimate with, but most of the friendships we make throughout our lives are temporary. They exist in certain times and/or places, and while their memory is carried with us and they may be rekindled briefly or for a substantial period of time, we are not committed to actively building them every day of our lives. 

Fatuous love seems like "dating just to date" to me. Like the first relationship I was in, which was based more on my desire to revel in his desire for me than in anything else. We were giving to each other, but not of one another. 

Infatuation is pure passion. Again, a no-brainer. No actual relationship is involved in situations of infatuation, so intimacy and commitment are impossible.

Companionate love might be the most interesting to me. I think that this is most clearly where friendship and love overlap. These are the friends you consider family. The kind of friends you say, "I love you" to. The kind of friends you don't have to say you love for them (and everyone else) to know. These are the kind of friends you know you'll have forever, even when that means actual phone calls and trips to see one another--that's where the commitment comes in. Friendships you will actively work at despite adverse circumstances fall under companionate love, in my mind. This is what I feel for TN, KS, SP, SH, EY, etc. I can also see this describing love between old people, who are completely devote to each other but past most/all forms of sexual desire. Hmm--this might be why really close friends are so often compared to old married couples.

Empty love makes me sad inside. It makes me think of people who are trapped in loveless marriages or who are too scared of starting over again to get out of a relationship they no longer want to be in. I want to banish it.

And finally we've reached consummate love. To me, this is conventional Love-with-a-capital-L love. It's a The Notebook kind of love. If I've ever come close to this triangle, it was a weird scalene version with intimacy being the shortest end, passion the longest, and commitment somewhere in the middle, but honestly I don't think the sides actually touched in the situation to which I'm referring. This is love after the romancing bit is over. When approaching equilateral-ness, this is a "real love", whole satisfaction embodied in one other individual. This is the kind of love for which I've been told sacrifices don't feel like sacrifices and obligations to the other resemble obligations to the self. This is the deep kind of love that mostly terrifies me, though a small part of me wants it at some point in the future.

An excerpt from a recent Thought Catalog article that really resonated with me:

"I’ve been raised in a society that both exalts love and fears it. A society that tells me love is rare and experienced only under particular circumstances; beginning with family and radiating outward to long term relationships and close, time-worn friendships. To love too quickly is deemed foolish. To love too many, is superficial. Our tragedy is that we believe something can only be beautiful when it is rare. We exist in a society that dismisses the beauty in everyday life. We overlook the small, fleeting moments that make up our day, because we’ve become jaded to the heaviness of a cat sleeping on our lap; the warmth of someone else’s fingers filling the space between our own... Sometimes it’s okay to abandon caution and open yourself up to the possibility of a connection with another human being. It’s okay to be vulnerable. We were born with an incredible capacity for love...The English language doesn’t contain the vocabulary to express different levels of love—instead using one abstract word to encompass the entire complicated spectrum of human emotion. In Spanish, love between family is separated from love between spouses. In Greek, there are four distinct terms, each with its own meaning. Working with such a limited capacity for expression, it’s no wonder our society as a whole appears to perpetually be in turmoil over the concept of love. We’re in constant pursuit of it, yet question it when we experience it; herald it’s beauty, yet fear that we will be left broken in its wake. Love becomes a contradiction. It simultaneously becomes the root of our joys and our woes."

I have been told before that I say those words too easily. I've had friends freak out when I drop it in casual conversation. I've gotten raised eyebrows from others when I direct it towards a friend. I've even had people criticize my and my ex's use of the phrase during our relationship. ...Such interactions confuse and annoy me. There are so many kinds of love. I'm sick of everyone privileging romantic and consummate love over all of the other loves. And then next time someone suggests that I'm wrong in my usage, I'ma direct them here, to what I think is a comprehensive guide to all the ways you can love someone who isn't family. 

Things I Can't Stand Number Next:

when people don't believe that a man and a woman can be close friends without romantic feelings lurking under the surface on one or both parts. 

My best friend on this campus is a man. Since wresting that title from the women on this campus who used to share it, he has also managed to supersede people from home who have known me since the days of Lunchables and Sailor Moon. Not only do I never feel like I have to pretend to be anything I'm not when I'm talking to or hanging out with him, I also never feel like I can't be anything I am--those are very different sentiments, even if they initially seem like two sides of the same coin, and I've actually never had that before. We can communicate with just a look, and finish each other's sentences, and I feel like he truly and thoroughly gets me. I have this wonderful feeling of home-ness when I'm around him or talking to him that I hope never dissipates. 

But I'm not romantically interested in him in the least. First off, while I recognize that he's a beautiful man, I'm not attracted to him. Sometimes we party together and will find a section of a dance floor to dance around each other in, but I can't imagine actually touching him while we're dancing. I find the thought of grinding with him both disturbing and hilarious. I actually can't even bring myself to imagine kissing him. I don't even want to think about his dick. Even typing this has me skeeved out. We very rarely make physical contact of any sort, but I can come to him crying because my boyfriend just dumped me or because my mom is going to be in the hospital for a month and he will help me put myself back together again with just his words and the way he cares.

But when I casually mentioned to two of my former roommates that he and I had talked about maybe living together next year if he also got a job in D.C., they started making skeptical and disapproving faces at one another. I asked them what was wrong, and they both said, "Nothing." It was obviously something, so I pressured them on it, and M finally said, "Don't you think living with him is a bad idea?" I don't understand why it would be, and said as much to them. They launched into this big spheel about how living together will bring feelings that I don't know that I have to the surface and how I'll be jealous seeing him with other girls and yada yada yada. I was listening to them spewing this nonsense and this scene from Awkward Black Girl actually played in my head:

 
They could have asked things about how neat/messy he is, or whether we fight about silly stuff that would get really annoying in a shared space. They could have brought up the fact that living with J almost destroyed our friendship sophomore year, which is both valid and relevant. But no, these bitches--who actually know me quite well--basically went straight to this idea that I'm already in love with him and just in denial and how living together would force me to quit playing.

...The fuck?!

I wanted to rebut that I didn't fall for either of them when we lived together, even though we were very good friends, but Idk how much they know about my recently embraced non-heterosexuality and didn't feel like putting my shit on blast in the middle of an already tense conversation.

I don't understand why people assume that having a very emotionally intimate relationship with a person is, by definition, a precursor to wanting a physically intimate relationship with that person. Do I love him? In some ways, more than I've ever loved anyone. In other ways, not. at. all. There are countless ways to love a person, and I don't think any of them necessitate any other. It deeply offends me that these ladies seem to think I'm incapable of non-romantic love with a male-gendered person I like to share various aspects of my life with.

I swear Ryan O'Connoll lives in my head.

"I just don’t want to wake up one day and feel estranged from everyone. I don’t wake up one day and ask myself where everyone went."

--The man who doesn't know he's my internet BFFL, in this Thought Catalog post

This is one of the things that terrifies me the most about becoming an adult in the real world. My friends have jobs all over the country. Hell, someone really important to me is moving to fucking Thailand. It's hard enough to keep up with my friends on campus who aren't in my eating club--how will I stay in touch with friends who aren't in the same time zone? I can barely manage to coordinate times to eat with people who live on the same campus as me most of the time, and you're expecting me to transition easily into this new world where if I want to see my close friend who just got a great job in Ohio, I'm going to have to get on a PLANE? I don't know how to be ready for this.

Sometimes it seems to me like life is this grand process of gradually getting comfortable with a group of people until you feel like you can be yourself and everything is wonderful and then getting wrenched away from that group and having to start over somewhere else where people don't know you or get your references, then gradually finding and coming to love people there and being wrenched away again. Thinking like this makes me want to be a hermit. But even hypothetical future self-induced hermithood wouldn't keep me from feeling like I'm about to lose the best relationships I've ever had.  

Enjoying someone's company v. liking them "enough"

Two of my dear friends have been dealing with similar interesting and unfortunate situations recently. It's a situation both I and my ex went through a version of, and some might say we paid for not paying enough attention to it. 

So you have this friend, or this acquaintance, and you're trying to figure out whether your feelings for them go beyond friend/acquaintance-ship. Maybe you've learned that they have feelings for you. Maybe you just like spending time with them so much that you're conflicted about what you're feeling. Whatever. The point is, how do you know where to draw the line between liking someone as a person and liking them enough to be in a relationship with them? What are the ethics of entering a relationship for exploratory purposes? Should you have to feel some romantic-comedy-esque "spark" or intense desire before embarking on the whole relationship thing, or is it cool if you just like to kick it with X or Y person and want to make your kicking it an official thing?

I guess what I'm really driving at here is this: 

What exactly makes a lover different from a friend?

Apart from sexytime fun, of course. Because as hard as I try and try to think about what separates them, I'm coming up empty. I feel like both of the relationships I've been in were like, suddenly I had a new best friend I also got to regularly hook up with and be cutesy and publicly physical with. And even though the ends of these relationships had me feeling like a hot ass mess for days, the level of emotional commitment I felt to them can't even touch the foundations of the emotions I have for some of my friends. But saying that sex is the only difference seems...just somehow fundamentally like I'm doing something wrong, though Idk if it's my friendships or my romances. I have never found that I necessarily like the person I'm dating MORE than I like my closest friends, and honestly I'm not sure I would trust such feelings if I ever developed them. I even get conflicted about choosing to hang out with a partner over hanging out with my besties. 

But I'm getting off-topic. I begin with the above question in order to better understand the point and goal of relationships. I was at an event on Black Love on Tuesday night, and one of the icebreaker questions asked at the event was something to the effect of, what do you look for in a relationship, and my answers were basically the same things I look for in a close friendship. Which leads me to re-realize (because I've addressed this before) that I'm unsure what prompts me to turn friend/acquaintance-ships into relationships besides knowing that the other party is romantically (sexually?) interested in me and me not being actively disinterested in him (or, theoretically, her). And this question has never been posed to me directly, but I'm afraid that if someone asked me, say, what I wanted to "get" out of a relationship, I wouldn't know what to say but sex and companionship...and neither of those things really necessitates the title. I'm fully comfortable giving and receiving the title expecting only those two things though, and it seems a little bit ridiculous to me to expect anything more than those two things going into a title-based situation. 

Where does the l-word come in? (Love.) I...don't even know what that word is supposed to mean with regards to any sort of relationship, but particularly not with a romantic relationship. Do I NEED to get to that level for a relationship to be "worth it"? Can I still just use it to mean something in me resonates with something in you and I like the frequency we're vibing at? If I like the way that spending time with you makes me feel, should I just say that instead of trying to fit it into ambiguous constructs like "love"? Is that revolutionary or am I copping out? Maybe I should be trying to expand the definition of love to be applicable to all those various situations, but...even though I guess that's what I do now, I'm not entirely comfortable with that. Maybe it's a word that should retain some sort of special value, so that everyone knows what you're talking about when you use it.

How do we have legitimate and meaningful interactions when we're not even sure what we mean by the words we're using?

I'm getting off topic again, it seems. It seems to confuse some of my dear friends that I have no problem with what might be called "casual" relationships. By this I mean I can go into a relationship that I know isn't going to last and still be committed to and emotionally invested in that relationship. (This most likely stems from the fact that I conceptualize relationships as transient and ephemeral in nature, thus if I was unwilling to involve myself in romances that I didn't think would last, I would be committing myself to spinsterdom.) And yeah I guess that sounds like I'm just setting myself up to get hurt a lot, but again...that's just part of the way I fundamentally understand the game. I also get a lot of joy and contentment and comfort and satisfaction. 

All this to say, I'm unsure whether I really have even a fuzzily defined line between liking someone as a person and liking them enough to enter into a relationship with them if they expressed interest in something of this nature. I have trouble even imagining what sorts of characteristics would bring someone from one side of this hypothetical line to the other. This means I have nothing on which to even base an understanding of where people are coming from when they're averse to trying relationships with persons whose company (and maybe even affections) they enjoy. I want to understand, though...I really do. Because sometimes my perspective doesn't seem healthy to me. 

Best birthday week ever:

So I turned 22 at the end of January, on Sunday the 29th. We started celebrating on Saturday, though, because some friends were going out of town on a ski trip, which means my week of birthday celebrations is coming to a close. 

It has, without a doubt, been the absolute best birthday week of my short life. 

Saturday the 28th, I got a text message from JA telling me not to make dinner plans. She and JC came to meet KS and I at the library where we'd been working and asked me where I wanted to dinner. I wanted to trek to a good Chinese place that was a little ways away and pick up a bottle of wine on the way, so after we met up with MM, that's exactly what we did. When we stopped at the liquor store on the way to the Chinese food place--it's BYOB--MM bought me a bottle of Ciroc as a birthday gift, and I picked up a good Moscato to have with dinner. MJP met us there. Dinner was great and we had ridiculous conversation as I always have with my good friends (even if there was an awkward moment when I blurted out that my mom has cancer...there's never a good time to tell people that, but that was probably one of the worst times). They treated me to my meal, and I was glad that that whole group could get together again to celebrate me. 

Sunday the 29th was my actual birthday. My mom and my Nana drove up to campus to bring me one of Nana's famous homemade Great-Aunt-Mabel's-secret-family-recipe birthday cakes and homemade pecan brittle, along with a giant bag of pecans straight from Georgia. They stayed and chatted for about an hour, then made excuses when I asked them to have lunch with me and headed home. I laid around for a little while in my bed doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING til that got boring and I headed to the house, where I read blogs and chilled for a few hours while my friend CB put together a dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant for me. A bunch of my Quad friends got together and took me to dinner, where ChoosingPancakes told the waitress it was my birthday and they brought me tiramisu with a candle in it. It was cute, and no one has ever really done that for me before--once we let it slip that it was my birthday when I was at home with my family and SH, but that we had cakes waiting at home, and the waiter brought me a tiny container of whipped cream with a candle in it, which was cute, but no one had ever intentionally notified the wait-staff that it was my birthday in order to surprise me with a birthday treat before. After dinner, we went back to the house and played Apples to Apples, which I am evidently terrible at because I didn't get any cards, haha. Then some of my other (pre-Quad friends) started to show up. We had, of course, turned Apples to Apples into a drinking game, and when more people started to show up, we devolved into just drinking. Then BC wanted to go sleep, so we had cake before he left and more people started to show up, and RC surprised me with a bottle of Disaronno, an incredibly delicious Italian amaretto, while MH and KG gave me a collection of hair products that hadn't worked for them but might for me. We were all sitting on the floor, talking and drinking, when ChoosingPancakes did the absolute cutest thing anyone has ever done for me on my birthday: she made everyone in the room share their favorite memory of me. Some of my friends were silly, but some of them (her included) were incredibly poignant, and I started to tear up a little. (Had I been sober, I would probably have started crying. +1 for alcohol's ability to dull my senses.) A bunch of people were doing a thesis boot camp in the morning, so shortly after said sharing and caring, half of my party contingent left, and the rest of us moved downstairs for some beirut. I played two games of three-on-three, and won both games. It was all in all a fabulous night, slightly tainted only by the fact that someone who shall not be named tried to go home with me (I blogged about that already). 

Monday passed fairly uneventfully, if I recall. On Tuesday, I got an email from the Package Room saying I had a package to pick up, and I knew I hadn't purchased anything recently, so I was intrigued as to what it might be. I went to pick it up, and it was the entire line of Twisted Sista products, that I had won on a Brown Girl Gumbo giveaway! What a great birthday present! 

On Wednesday, I got another mysterious email from the Package Room. I still hadn't bought anything, so I excitedly went to the Student Center, wondering what this might be. Surprise, surprise--it was a present from my friend RG! He sent me three good CDs (Erykah Badu, Rafael Saadiq, and Marvin Gaye) and a picture of us from my birthday party last year. I had been surprised by RC's gift, but this garnered genuine shock. I'm a simple girl; making me feel recognized is like, the highest honor anyone can bestow on me. Call me cheesy, but I was touched. It was like, the icing on this huge multi-tiered cake of love and appreciation my friends gave me this week—I can’t remember the last time I felt so deeply cared about. 

On Thursday, TN came down from Rutgers to take me out to dinner, since she couldn’t make it down over the weekend. We went to Alchemist and Barrister, another restaurant in town that I’d never been to, and I had hot apple cider with butterscotch schnapps (omg) and a delicious chicken pot pie. I caught up on her life and she caught up on mine and it was weird how much we didn’t know about what was going on with each other. She’s another example of how I need to do better at maintaining my friendships. (Side note, I feel like she’s hardcore judging me for no-longer-recent exploits, but whatever.) When we got back to her car, she gave me my second present (besides dinner): an awesome framed piece of art with a bird outside of a birdcage, and it’s drawn or painted on a page from a dictionary. I’m not doing it justice—maybe I’ll upload a picture when I get back to campus—but it’s SO ME. So I guess she’s an example of how even when my deep friendships change on the surface, the degree to which my friends know or understand me doesn’t change even as we grow and develop and mature.

By Friday, I was like, okay, this week has to slow down. It has just been too awesome. I was wrong. So, so very wrong. There I was, chilling at work, pretending to write my thesis, when I get a phone call. It’s from a number I don’t know, and I was contemplating whether or not to pick it up when some part of my brain was like, wait, isn’t 202 the area code for D.C.? *picks up the phone immediately* It was the woman from Human Resources at Mathematica, calling to tell me that the interview team thought that I’d be a really great fit, and she’d like to offer me the position!

I wish I had a video of me jumping up and down in the basement lobby of Fine Hall.

Like, WHAT?! This much awesomeness can happen to me in one week? I’ve been told it’s important not to seem to eager, so I thanked her profusely and agreed to get back to her by the end of the following week about whether I’d like to accept. I then called my momma and my daddy and texted some important people and tweeted and Facebooked and couldn’t wait to get out of work and celebrate…

…which actually basically waited until the next night, when KS, JB, and I drove up to New Brunswick to go to Delta’s, this soul food place I discovered but failed to actually eat at over the summer, and which we’ve been telling ourselves we’ll explore for months. When we made our reservations—because they close to people without reservations on the weekends, as KS, TN, and I learned once in the Fall—they asked us if we were aware of their dress code: “casual chic,” meaning no baggy jeans, no workboots, etc. Toto, I don’t think we’re in the dining hall anymore, lol. I wore a dress from Shabby Apple that I’d won on a Naturally Beautiful Hair giveaway towards the end of last year and hadn’t found an occasion for yet, while KS wore a nice button up shirt and khakis and dress shoes, and I do say we looked pretty shnazzy (though he did still get carded, while our waitress like, turned down seeing JB’s and my IDs, bahaha).  We started off with fried calamari and seafood gumbo as appetizers, with a pitcher of peach sangria to share between the three of us. The breading on the calamari was DIVINE, and my gumbo was spicy but rich enough that it just went down smoothly and deliciously. Then after lamenting about how we actually wanted to eat everything. on. the. menu., we finally settled on the following: for me, smothered pork chops with sides of mac and cheese and candied yams; for KS, ox tail with sides of black eyed peas and rice and collard greens; and for JB, a fried seafood medley including shrimp and catfish, with hush puppies and yams. Our plates were so full, and sweet Jesus the food was indescribably amazing. There was live jazz/R&B happening behind us and I wanted to die of satisfaction with every bite…I truly don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an eating experience as much as I enjoyed Delta’s. We made the decision right then and there that the three of us are eating there at reunions indefinitely into the future, and that KS and I might bring our families there for graduation dinner. 

…What is my life?