Friday, February 13, 2004

Talk About Love

Is it bad luck to try to talk about love on Friday the 13th? Maybe so, but love talk and what exactly “love” means is a diversion from primary talk, now that Valentine’s Day is upon us. We have two elementary-schoolers in our house, and a lot of paste and glitter has been tossed around lately in the name of love.

For our first-grader, valentines amount to nothing more – or less – than a grand art project.

For the fourth-grader, though, I can tell this is the final year that valentines will be seen as just the doily equivalent of a friendly punch on the arm that says, “Hey, buddy – you’re cool.” It’s scarily premature from my parental perspective, but I can see that my daughter is already fighting the cultural insistence on sexualizing friendships. Already, at age nine, she has had to lecture her friends impatiently about being pals with a boy: “He’s a boy who is my friend. He is not a boyfriend! We both love books about dragons; we’re friends.” I overhear other clarifying conversations between her schoolmates: “Does he like her, or does he like-like her?”

I remember these same inarticulate conversations from my own school days, as relative gender-neutrality in fourth grade gave way to training-bra sexuality in fifth, heralded in by the girls who lubed their lips with Bonnie Bell Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker and who carried Goody combs in their Levi’s back pockets to constantly re-feather their bangs. And as for me, in my long braids, home-sewn dresses, and sagging kneesocks, I loved only my girlfriends, and we told each other as much, though we were slowly realizing that to be overheard was to be misunderstood.

It has always been a struggle to express the deep love of friendship. There is a terrible poverty of language for the many different ways we all know we love people. I am not the first to wish those famed Eskimo linguists who can name a dozen different kinds of “snow” could help us label in English these many shades of human tenderness.

Women, at least, have had the edge on expressing the love between friends. While women were mostly shut out of the competition of the public marketplace in the 18th and 19th centuries, one of the few perks of being relegated to the private, domestic sphere was that women had more opportunities to develop deep and lasting friendships with those of their own gender. Some of my students have struggled with the natures of these friendships as we read letters between women of this period, which quite commonly sound like missives between lovers: “My dearest,” “My darling,” “My sweet, I long to be with you.” My students want clarity: “So ... they were in love? As in love love?” I sympathize with the desire to categorize, but love often defies such tidiness. “They loved one another,” I say, “and these letters trace that meaning in the only language they had. It’s all we have, too.” This does not satisfy. Why should it?

With so many images of sex masquerading as romance today, a person has to look hard for images of true love between friends. Writer Margaret Anderson tried to parse these out by proposing that “In romantic love you want the other person. In real love you want the other person’s good” (The Fiery Fountains, 1969). A student of mine recently analyzed a photo of playwright Eve Ensler with her arms wrapped tenderly around actor Salma Hayek in honor of V-Day, a grassroots mobilization to fight violence against women. The image speaks volumes about the power of love, as does the V-Day movement itself. “But think about it,” my student wrote. “What would you think if this were a photo of two men embracing?” She’s right. What do men lose by being shut out from such demonstrations of friendship?

This Valentine’s Day, I’m thinking outside the frilly chocolate box to celebrate the rich love of friendship, where we needn’t be monogamous, but love best when we love widely. While I may be looking out my window onto 6 weeks of gray compacted Indiana ice and snow, and some of my female friends are gazing out onto the San Francisco Bay, or stubbly Iowa fields, or Vermont cow pastures, or Chicago boutiques, or Rocky Mountain mesas, or many elsewheres, we are all looking out on a landscape shaped by our love for one another. We say it in our letters, on the phone: “I love you. I love you.” What does it mean, exactly?

Our 6-year-old recently wrote a story, on carefully folded and stapled paper, about two cats. The plot is shaped entirely by one question and one answer. “How much do you love me?” asks one cat. The other says, “I love you so, so, so, so-so-so-so much.” – and those “so’s” take up pages. They are the bulk of the book, the heart of the story. Those “so’s” – those intensifiers – are to me the best articulation of love between friends. Such love intensifies life. I wish you that intensity.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on February 13, 2004
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