2021-02-05 20:55:46
Intimate friendships don’t come with shared social scripts that lay out what they should look like or how they should progress. These partnerships are custom-designed by their members. Mia Pulido, a 20-year-old student at Drew University, says that she and her “soul mate,” Sylvia Sochacki, 20, have cobbled together role models in what has felt like a “Frankenstein” process: Through reading about intimate female friendships from centuries ago, the pair discovered a framework for a relationship that doesn’t neatly fit the contemporary labels of romantic or platonic.
They found their complementary personalities reflected in the characters Sherlock and Watson, and they embraced the casual affection (and the terms of endearment “Bubble” and “Spoo”) that they came across in a note between a wife and husband; it was tucked into a used book they found at a garage sale. Pulido has found it freeing to build a relationship around the needs and desires of Sochacki and herself, rather than “having to work through this mire of what society has told you this relationship consists of.”
Many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others. But these friendships can be models for how we as a society might expand our conceptions of intimacy and care.
For more than a decade, Nicole Sonderman didn’t mind if the only people who understood her friendship with Rachel Hebner were the two women who were part of it. Sonderman sums up their relationship as “having a life partner, and you just don’t want to kiss them.”
In the years when they both lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, the friends were fluent in the language of each other’s moods and physical changes. Before Hebner suspected that she might be pregnant, Sonderman made her buy a pregnancy test, steered her into the bathroom, and sat in the adjacent stall as Hebner took it. Four years later, the roles reversed: Hebner had the same accurate premonition about Sonderman. “We paid more attention to each other than we did to ourselves,” Sonderman, 37, told me.
They occasionally navigated around other people’s confusion about or combativeness toward their friendship. Their preferred term of endearment for each other, wife, wasn’t a problem for Sonderman’s then-husband. But once Hebner divorced her husband and started dating, her romantic partners got jealous, especially the women she dated. Sonderman grudgingly placated them by calling Hebner “wiffles” instead of wife.
After those years in Alaska, the pair spent a few years several time zones apart, as Sonderman and her then-husband moved around for his work. Eventually Sonderman moved back to Alaska, but Hebner had relocated to Indiana. Phone calls and occasional visits became their friendship’s support beams. Sonderman said that Hebner reached out less and less as she grappled with a cascade of difficulties: She was in an abusive romantic relationship and she lost her job because she had no one else to take care of her daughter while she worked. She was depressed. In October 2018, Hebner died by suicide.
For Sonderman, Hebner’s death was devastating. The women had envisioned one day living near each other in Alaska, where the two of them had met, and where Hebner longed to return. Now Sonderman had none of that to look forward to. For six months after Hebner’s death, she kept earphones in when she went to the grocery store. She couldn’t bear small talk.
Sonderman found it hard to translate her grief to others. “Most people don’t understand. They’ll just be like, ‘Oh yeah, I had a friend from high school who died’ or something and try to relate. But it doesn’t really resonate with me.” In other cases, people would impose a salacious and inaccurate story line onto their relationship to try to make sense of it. Because Hebner was bisexual, Sonderman said, some people believed that they were secretly lovers, and that Sonderman was closeted.
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