the honeymoon theory

on friendship as a mirror to romantic love or some such

there is a mutual friend of ours who, when he found out we were going on this trip, did not congratulate us. instead he was amused. and wanted to bet (against?) about us. 10 days, just the two of us, the balkans… that was the plan! the ambition! he gave us maybe 4 days before one of us would snap. i found this very intriguing, and, if i’m honest, slightly motivating.

i have been thinking about why that was his instinct. two women, close friends for years, travelling alone together - and the assumption is not “how lovely” but “how long.” maybe there is something in that worth pulling at.

but hey. we did not snap. we did not even come close.

here’s what we did do: had raki (local brandy with >40% abv that can burn your oesophagus) watching the sun go down over the adriatic. had long slow dinners that went nowhere in particular. took each other’s photos on cameras and complained extensively about each other’s framing (mostly me, coz she sucks at clicking them). she bought a banana¹ every single day of the trip, which i found baffling in the way that only a truly unnecessary habit can be baffling. i made her try on countless dresses in a little shop in albania and then conducted a full fashion shoot in the changing rooms - multiple rounds, ratings, a shortlisting process, twirling, the works. she was a very good sport about this. i oohed and aahed over every single one and i meant it.

she is vegetarian. we went to what i can only describe as a legendary seafood restaurant - the kind of place that has literally one job and does it with its whole chest and their grandmother’s dignity - and she ordered her veg risotto first. the owner’s face fell in real time, visibly and acutely, in front of us both. she recovered beautifully: “oh, my friend will have the seafood risotto, don’t worry.” the owner looked so relieved. i felt personally vindicated on behalf of the restaurant.

i also bought snacks for all our many bus journeys because someone had to, and every time i opened a bag and passed it over, she would look at it and say, with complete sincerity, “oh my god why didn’t you buy more, i told you to get more.” she had told me no such thing. this happened at least 4 times. i started buying the snacks purely to watch it happen.

she kidnapped me into the albanian alps - and i want to be intentional about the word kidnapped, because i was specifically deceived about the snow situation - and i showed up because i love her, and because i didn’t want to give her material. both equally valid reasons. at a fortress in montenegro, there was a ledge. a real one². a jump-down-or-go-home situation on a hike we were already well committed to (she, committed; me, bullied into). she cleared it immediately, the way people do when heights simply don’t register as a problem for them, which i find both impressive and slightly inconsiderate. i stood there for what felt like several geological epochs, telling her earnestly that she could absolutely go without me, i’d wait, it was fine. she gave me 3 patient demonstrations. she waited. i did it eventually, very ungracefully, with a small noise i will not describe, and we laughed for 10 minutes and then continued talking about something else entirely as if it had never happened. i would not have done it without her. i don’t think i’d have done a lot of it without her.

one night in budva we were supposed to go on a pub crawl. instead we spent half an hour lying in bed trying to get the other person to be the one to cancel. neither of us cracked. we showed up, which turned out to be the right call. the night delivered adventures, a montenegrin man with grand ambitions (wink wink), and an outcome for one of us that i have sworn to take to my grave. i will not say who. what i will say is that the trip was, in multiple senses, a success.

at some point i started calling it our honeymoon, mostly as a joke. it stopped being a joke around day 3. we had, by any honest accounting, ticked every box³. romance of place, romance of dailiness, the deep animal comfort of being known by someone who has seen you at your worst and shown up anyway. neither of us is in a long-term romantic relationship right now, and i kept waiting for that to feel like a gap, like evidence of something missing. it didn’t. it felt, genuinely, like the opposite - like proof of something.

which is the thing i keep turning over.

we have decided, collectively as a society, that a certain quality of intimacy belongs to romance. the long dinners, the shared adventures, the slow accumulation of in-jokes and irritations and forgiven moments. we have filed all of it under: partnership, future, the “right person” eventually. and meanwhile friendship sits in a different drawer, categorised as wonderful but somehow supplementary, the thing you have while you wait for the real thing to arrive.

i don’t think i believe that anymore.

there is a version of this essay where i conclude that friendship is love, full stop, and leave it there. but the more interesting question, to me, is why it took going somewhere entirely foreign - somewhere neither of us had been, somewhere that asked us to be genuinely lost and genuinely present - for this to become visible as the thing it already was. the unfamiliarity asked more of us. the mountains, the ledge, the bus journeys, the not-knowing-where-we-were-going-for-dinner. any good relationship, of any kind, requires you to be a little off-balance together. requires someone to give you 3 patient demonstrations and wait.

she did that for me. i would do it for her. in other ways, we already have, for longer than either of us can quite remember.

our mutual friend, by the way, has not asked how the trip went. i choose to believe this is because he already knows, and owes us money.

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resuming regular programming, here are 3 essays

i absolutely loved about love, longing, and the illusion of a perfect romantic relationship ~

And yet, love, as it always has, demands resilience. Love is inconvenient and inefficient and unhygienic and noisy and exhausting. Love is monstrous and obnoxious and too expensive. It requires gripping the silver goblet of our terror and swallowing it down.

Quick, find somebody to kiss

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Relationships can sometimes be pure projection. Which is why they’re so easy to exist inside of when the other person isn’t actually contributing very much, when someone else (often you) is doing the labor that makes the whole thing feel alive: planning the dates, asking the questions, telling the jokes, injecting the energy that gives the situation its little sparks of life.

was he special, or are you just good at making things feel special?

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Literature returns to unrequited love again and again not because writers are masochists, but because it is among the most clarifying of human experiences. When love is not returned, we are stripped of all the comfortable noise (the plans, the shared calendars, the domestic rhythms) and left with just the bare fact of how we feel. And what we discover there, in that stripped-down place, tells us something essential about who we are.

Are we capable of love? Deeply, really, without guarantee of return? Then we are fully alive. We are the sun.

Always Be the One in Love

i’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments <3

Things that make me happy:

Shreya Ghoshal’s singing and music. Sabalenka winning the Sunshine Double. My flatmates making sabudana khichdi for me. Strangers showing up to read alongside me in libraries. An exhibition on love letters. Spring flowers. Sausage rolls.

Things that make me not happy:

Being scolded by Balkan aunties. iPhone battery. Sunburn. Sunscreen.

until next time & new reads!

🌻

~ rufus

1. twice she also ventured into purchasing an apple. that truly baffled me. since apple is objectively the dullest fruit out there. why would anyone introduce that into their vacay is beyond me.

2. i stand by this. google maps had it marked as “the ladder of kotor”. there was no ladder.

3. we even held hands at one point! i know! gasp!