The Women in My Life
January 11th, 2009
Watched The Women while Raven was out of town mostly for the experience of seeing a movie without a single man in it — started thinking on why we like women in quartets — from Little Women to the Sex in the City women… Haven’t read/watched it but even the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, again, four girls. Maybe five is an unwieldy number (except for the Spice Girls?), two would be suggestive, and with three, every time you saw only two of them talking you would ache for the one who was left out?
While there wasn’t for me a lot more to the movie to recommend it, I was grateful that the characters weren’t reduced to “the smart one” “the sporty one” “the funny one” that seems to happen a lot. Or maybe that’s something about our friendships, we use them as these polarizing points to define ourselves by? You may be relatively athletic, but next to your friend who runs every day and plays tennis three times a week, you’re just plain bookish? On the other hand, next to your friend who devours six books a week, you feel just illiterate? This is something I couldn’t quite work out while doing my NaNoWriMo novel: I’d feel like characterization in one context would be completely contradicted when the character was in another context.
Lots of meditating this week on friendships, lovely old ones and shiny new ones, the reconnected ones via facebook, the ones where I am understood better than I understand myself, the ones that make me ache when they get convoluted and misunderstood. I don’t always understand why my experience of friendship with women can be so much more intense than Raven’s experiences of friendship, and then I stumbled across this, in Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage and got this, about the Victorian era:
Because the sexual aspect of a person’s identity was so much more muted than it later became, intense friendships with a person of the same sex were common and raised no eyebrows. People did not pick up the sexual connotations that often make even the most innocent expression of affection seem sexual to our sensibilities today. Perfectly respectable nineteenth-century women wrote to each other in terms like these: “[T]he expectations once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.” They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another’s portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivals or small slights.
I talk about this on the phone with Jenny, how the drama of friendship surprises me; that it rivals the intensity that was present in courtship and falling in love, an intensity I once believed would be absent from my life once I was married. And I can talk about it with Jenny because that is the friendship we have worked at almost as hard as we have worked at being married, with the attendant rewards; there is a sense of commitment and being safe knowing that we’ll work through anything that does come up, there is history and a sense of being known, and being called to honesty. And there is a completely non-sexual aspect of being “faithful” to one another, a loyalty that I think we are each called to, that takes place in a dimension apart from our marriages and motherhood, but makes us stronger in those roles, that we can support each other in those roles. Proving that our hearts are not zero sum games, it’s been my experience that being faithful to a friend doesn’t compete with being faithful to a husband, and that there’s the way that friendship expands us and makes room in our lives for more friendships.
