* * *
In less than a year of friendship, Aminatou had opened up to Ann about romantic dramas, money, and health. This was faster than usual for her. But she still found it difficult to talk about her relationship with her father. Aminatou hadn’t seen him in quite some time and he was coming for a visit from Belgium, where her family had lived for the past decade. In her family, as in a lot of immigrant families, parents and children often talk to each other in terms of accomplishments. Aminatou wasn’t in graduate school and she had no career to speak of. She didn’t feel like she had anything going on or anything to show for her life. In the years since her mom died, it felt like her personal relationship with her father had withered. The prospect of this lunch was stressful on so many levels.
She made a reservation at a fancy restaurant, and she remembers saying a small prayer before walking in: “God, let this not be a disaster.” Wishful thinking. They sat outside on the patio, across from each other at the table. The conversation was lively whenever they talked about the news and world events. But things felt strained whenever they turned to her work or their other family members. Aminatou missed her mother’s soft touch in moments like these, and it was obvious that her father did too. Her mother would have been a great buffer, helping bridge the emotional divide between father and daughter. They were both still grieving her, and without her, they didn’t have a way of talking about their sadness.
Aminatou’s father hadn’t said anything unkind or that she was a failure, but the lunch still felt like a complete disaster. It did not help that Aminatou was walking around with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. In a fugue state afterward, she ended up on Ann’s couch.
When Ann asked how it went, Aminatou could barely produce coherent words and started hyperventilating. She cried. Hard. At the time, it felt like a completely shocking thing to do. She rarely cried, even in front of people she’d known for decades, and she’d known Ann for only a few months. Out of the corner of her eye, she searched Ann’s face for signs of annoyance or judgment. Nothing. Well, not nothing, but Ann didn’t seem the least bit fazed that a hysterical woman was wailing on her couch. (Honestly, it was probably a regular amount of dignified crying, but all feelings are dramatic to Aminatou.) Ann was calm and steady. She didn’t need to know every single detail of why the lunch felt so disastrous—all she needed was to see that her friend was upset.
Ann stood up, walked into the bedroom, and called to Aminatou, “Do you want a Xanax?”
Yes. Aminatou very much needed a Xanax. But more than anything, she had needed to know that being overly emotional would not cause this new friend to run away. Growing up, she had internalized the idea that strong displays of emotion were to be avoided at all cost—otherwise people wouldn’t want to be around you. In that moment, Ann had passed a test that Aminatou hadn’t realized she was administering. It was also when Aminatou realized that she needed to open her eyes to the fact that Ann was showing up for her in a real way. She settled into a new level of security in the friendship.
* * *
It’s impossible to say exactly when the shift happened, but we had become more than besties. Our mutual friends started joining our names with an ampersand, a sure linguistic sign that you are publicly tied to another person. Ann & Amina. Amina & Ann. We became a vital part of each other’s daily support system, and we were grounded in the intimately mundane.
AMINATOU: have eaten 5 bags of fruit snacks today. this cant be good
ANN: poop or consequences
We had keys to each other’s apartments. We often made each other dinner after a long day at work. And any time difficulties with our families of origin cropped up, we would remind each other, “Ugh, this is why chosen fam is everything.”
Chosen family is not a label we invented. For decades, the LGBTQ community has used the term to describe people who decide to play significant roles in each other’s lives for the long haul. When most people think of a family, they often still think of getting married and having children—two life choices that have historically been denied to LGBTQ folks. The use of “chosen family” was first studied by the anthropologist Kath Weston, who was researching kinship in the gay and lesbian communities in San Francisco in the 1980s. She published her research in a 1991 book, Families We Choose, which describes the way these chosen families shared resources, co-parented children, and supported each other through illness, notably during the AIDS crisis. At the time, some critics pointed out that because many of the people who pioneered the use of the term “chosen family” were rejected by their families of origin, they did not have much choice in the matter at all. The psychology professor Karen Blair notes that, for queer people in the late 20th century, the choice to create alternative bonds outside of one’s biological family was often “borne out of necessity.” But for us—and for many other people who use that term to describe their kinship bonds today—“chosen family” describes intimate relationships that are freely selected.
We listed each other as the emergency contact on our HR forms at work. We hosted parties together. We planned Friendsgiving menus. We were in our mid- and late 20s, peak wedding years among our large and far-flung friend groups. Without romantic partners to split expenses with, we were feeling the financial strain. And so, as our friend circles overlapped more and more, we increasingly attended weddings together. We shared hotel rooms. We coordinated our looks for the ceremony. (Animal prints for Kate and Brant’s. Pink florals for Phoebe and Eric’s. Chic black for Gabe and Michael’s.) We gave wedding gifts jointly, signed, “Love, the Sow-Friedmans.” Of course, you can be super close to a friend even if you aren’t attending weddings as a pair or listing each other as an emergency contact. No two Big Friendships are alike. But this was our way of being a chosen family. We didn’t need a lavish ceremony to tell the world that we were a duo.
Our choice to show up at weddings as a family unit wasn’t just a cute stunt. It was an extension of our political beliefs that friendship is a relationship that’s equal in importance to romantic and family bonds.
The historian Stephanie Coontz, who studies marriage and family structures in America and Western Europe, notes that, in the same way that societies have changed their definitions and expectations of family and romantic relationships over time, the expectations for friendship have evolved over centuries. (Until we called her, Coontz, who makes her living studying intimate relationships, had never been asked about how marriage and family structures affect friendships!) She gave us a brief history of how powerful people in Western society have set the standards for friendship, and how people of other class and racial groups often developed their own variations on those standards.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, marriages tended to be arranged to make political or economic alliances or to create community solidarities. “Love was nice if it came afterwards, but it was not considered a good reason for marriage,” Coontz says. “And so friendships were very different and perhaps more emotionally central to people.”
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, when it became common to marry for love, middle-class people began worrying that the couple would have no reason to stay married if their affections dissipated. With more men working outside the home, women were newly responsible for domestic life, and the idea of separate spheres developed. This was an early version of the notion that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, with different sets of inherent skills and social roles. All men were now supposed to be ambitious, hard-nosed, and interested in public matters. And women were supposed to be sexually pure, emotional, and nurturing. If men and women are two sides of a coin, the theory went, they must get married and stay married in order to access the supposedly innate traits of the other. You complete me. “So this led to this intense romanticization of the other,” Coontz says, “but also it opened the way for a real flowering of male/male and female/female friendships, because those were the people that you had everything in common with, supposedly.”