Friendship between women and men
A friend translated a Chinese saying: “Fated to meet but not to stay together.” She wrote it out in Chinese as calligraphy and gave it to me as a gift. We both have some experience with this, I said, mentioning La Rochefoucauld, the author of such maxims as “There are only three cures for love, none of them foolproof.” His life was a series of reversals, but he found a close woman friend, Madame de Lafayette. What makes for a close friendship, I asked, and why, between men and women, are they so fraught? Attraction, affection, and desire overlap, and we encounter each other “out of order,” yet sometimes feel the hand of destiny. What do we do with it when we sense it? It took me a long time to work this out.
We intuit destiny in different ways. It’s like we arrived here with certain expectations, a kind of foretelling or foreshadowing of our life’s narrative to which events answer. As it unfolds, we start to see how destiny works — that it’s triggered by intuitions about others, but offers no guarantees as to the outcomes. We construct a narrative around these events and constantly rework it in light of experience. While life is a series of wholes, episodes with beginnings and ends, as my Melbourne friend asserts, the important human connections persist, even after death. (Stendhal made a theme of this.) Another correspondent applies this idea to human history, arguing that the collapse of a political system or the failure of a collective dream of progress is never final. When we look back, Walter Benjamin pointed out, we find emissaries from the present alive in earlier periods. It follows that emissaries from the future are also among us, together with fragments of all periods, vying for significance in our here and now.
Some say that life is best considered in seven-year increments that, grouped together, define broad periods within our lifespan, each of which is about some things and not others. (This isn’t a very elegant way of putting it, and of course there are many exceptions.) To the extent that we learn things from each period, life may progress dialectically, but — like destiny’s hand — this imposes a narrative on life that we may “make true” by artful revision. And many seem to live without much sense of a narrative at all. This is relevant because my calligrapher friend, an historian, shares my view that “narrative” is a valid term when it comes to describing life.
My sense of friendships between women and men is that they depend on an asynchronous open-endedness to thrive. You vow not to possess and yet still honor the unfolding connection. You share an acceptance and empathy, leavened by affection, that appreciates the luxury of being free of love’s complications. Marriage too moves toward friendship, a rediscovery.
Heartbreak is love’s hazard, as La Rochefoucauld noted. A close friendship between a woman and a man consciously seeks to forestall it. Heartbreak puts you out of sync with life. You close it off, fixated on what you think you lost. Only when you let yourself swim again in time do you recover. “The glittering sea,” a translator of Horace’s Odes put it: a half-drowned sailor drying his clothes in a temple and, we infer, planning another journey. Bon voyage, I say to him.
