Just after college, I lived with a close friend, and we did everything together. We went on road trips, went out dancing, visited each other’s families, and generally acted as each
other’s support system as we set up our first home outside of school life.
Then things started to change. She began dropping plans with me to do things with whomever she was seeing instead—always a man, of course. I didn’t get it. Why would hanging out with some guy she barely knew be more important than plans with me?
To her, disregarding my feelings to promote romantic ones with someone else was a totally fine thing to do. When I got mad at her for spontaneously going with a guy she’d been dating for two weeks to a local farm that we had talked about visiting for ages, she told me matter-of-factly, “I was raised to look for the person who I am going to share my life with and that’s my priority.”
Through that friendship I discovered that as people age, deeply close nonsexual relationships are not as acceptable as romantic ones, even when the people in them share a gender and are ostensibly straight. When we were in college and freshly out of it, my roommate was happy to go on road trips and cohost epic parties at our house. The more she got to a place of being ready to settle down, though, the less important our friendship became. Close friendships between two women after they found partners was queer, and not in a positive way.
On the night before my roommate was supposed to come to Easter dinner at my grandparents’ house, we had a blowout fight at a bar in front of a very alarmed bartender. I don’t remember anymore what I said to start it. I’m sure it had something to do with how we’d been spending less time together since she’d met the Italian architect she was dating.
“It’s like you th-think,” she stuttered, as though it was almost too unspeakable to say out loud, “It’s like you think you’re my boyfriend or something!”
Shame silenced me like a jab in the neck, and we walked home separately. We made up the next morning in time for dinner, but the feeling of being somehow wrong or grasping stuck with me until I moved into a queer co-op a year or so later. There, the idea of how relationships should proceed and who could be included in what and what gestures of friendship looked like were much more fluid, more carefully considered, and nothing about my perspective felt aberrant at all.
The importance of same-sex relationships has fluctuated over time, along with how they’re perceived from the outside. In Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz writes about the decline of the acceptable same-sex friendship. Until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nuclear family was not the common family unit. People’s attachments to their other kin took too much precedence. It wasn’t an expectation that marital intimacy would bring “happiness” per se; the emphasis was on economic stability and producing children. As Coontz explains, it was hard to think of personal happiness as the goal of marriage when so many women simply did it to survive.
Under those conditions, very close friendships between women were common. The Enlightenment-influenced view that reigned supreme during the nineteenth century was that love was based on “admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone’s good character,” even in a romantic relationship. People didn’t really discuss sex, so expressions of love with regard to friends and lovers sounded remarkably similar.
That changed when the taboo of speaking openly about sexual intimacy in marriage began to break down. A healthy sex life soon became a priority, and a somewhat sudden obligation for wives, who in the Victorian era were consigned to being angels on a pedestal in their domestic sphere. As the separation between men and women crumbled, those angels were expected to participate very differently in earthly delights.
“Deep marital intimacy had been difficult to achieve in the nineteenth century,” Coontz writes, “in the face of separate spheres for men and women, sexual repressiveness, and the strong cultural, practical, and moral limits on a couple’s autonomy. Now it seemed attainable. And because the progress of industrialization and democratization had weakened the political and economic constraints forcing people to get and stay married, such deep intimacy was now seen as the best hope of stability in marriage.”
Laws that made it more possible for women to survive outside of matrimony made romantic and sexual love the new focus of marriage, putting new pressure on the couple’s bond. To bolster this change, all other loves had to be diminished—or demonized. Coontz writes:
The pressure for couples to put marriage first and foremost in their lives led many women to become more dependent on their relationships with men. Proponents of “modern” sexuality and marriage were deeply suspicious of close ties between women. By the 1920s the heartfelt female friendships that had been such an important part of nineteenth-century female culture were under attack. . . . By that time intense relationships between women were considered childish infatuations that girls were encouraged to outgrow. At worst, they raised the specter of “abnormal” sexual or emotional development that could make heterosexuality unsatisfactory and marriage unstable.
Some of these same-sex relationships were definitely between two queer people, and I’m certain that many of them were not. The understanding of coded queerness in history has changed, and so has the standard for how close two people can be before it’s considered too close for “just friends.” Soon after friendships between women came to be seen as deviant, close relationships between men became suspect, too. Homosexuality was outlawed in many Western cultures, but two men sleeping in a bed together or showing other physical intimacies didn’t necessarily read as homosexual until the 1920s, according to Coontz. This shift didn’t just affect friendships; it dissolved intimate relationships within extended families, too.
“The new emphasis on heterosexual bonding,” she writes, “also called into question the veneration of mothers and the close sibling ties that had made it hard for nineteenth-century married couples to retreat into their own private world. . . . This was another way those of the new generation turned their backs on whatever stood in the way of achieving marital intimacy.”
All of this led to the “growing primacy of the couple in people’s range of commitments,” meaning the age of marriage for men and women fell during the first decades of the twentieth century, and marriage rates increased everywhere. Whatever people had once found in all sorts of dynamic, important relationships they were now only allowed to find within marriage. And so they started committing to it sooner and harder.
That doesn’t mean people don’t enjoy this relatively new order. For many, there is a great deal of diversion in making marital love the center of their lives and they’re happy to leave behind friends and other family ties in pursuit of that. But how much of that happiness is attached to an idea of a “tradition” that is only about a hundred years old?
Excerpt from THE LONELY HUNTER, by Aimée Lutkin, copyright © 2022 by Aimée Lutkin. Used by permission of The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.