Maybe your friends are the love of your life

Sometime in my mid-twenties, my mom gently suggested that how I was with my friends might not be attractive to boys. We were too involved with each others’ lives, she said. They were too much of my identity. She said this because I’d called her crying every couple of months for years, late at night after too many drinks, wondering why no one was ever interested in me. I wanted so badly to be in love, to be chosen, to have this elusive thing that seemed to come so easily to everyone else. “Where is my person?” I would ask her.

I remember being offended, telling her she didn’t get it—that it was different for my generation. I told her my friends were my world. They were my family, I said, in the absence of having any real family around. At twenty-one, I moved to Boston right after college with a friend¹. We’d both grown up in Colorado and had never traveled east of Chicago before we landed here to hunt for an apartment. She moved away two years later and eventually returned to Colorado as planned, but I never left. (I joke that Boston is my longest romantic relationship, but it’s true; those first years here were precisely like the heady, consuming, gobsmacked experience of falling in love, and twenty-six years later, the connection remains.)

Anyway, I rejected the idea that my friends took up too much space in my life, but still, I did view a romantic relationship as the holy grail. I’ve never believed we have to choose between the two, but if I were forced to back then, I’d have no doubt chosen romantic love. Friendship came easy; love did not. The opportunities for friendship were everywhere; love was scarce. Friendship was supportive, but love was salvation.

I actually started this essay last fall, six months or so after my relationship ended. I wanted to write about how my friends had saved my life in the wake of that breakup and how, after having danced in the holy grail of relationships—once with my ex-husband and a second time with my recent ex to whom I was engaged—that I began to feel, without sadness or loss, only gratefulness, that it might be my friends who are the great loves of my life. In the last few months, I kept opening it and poking at this piece, but I couldn’t quite nail what I wanted to say.

Then, this past weekend, I watched the full three seasons Somebody Somewhere on a trip to and from California with my friend Mia. It’s about a woman in her 40s, Sam, played by Bridget Everett, who moves back to her hometown to care for her dying sister (the show starts after the sister’s death) and adjusts to changes in her life and relationships with family and friends. If I had to summarize the show in one line, I’d say it’s a show about how we need each other. But, like, really need each other, in a way I’ve only understood in the last year. It’s a hilarious, sweet, brilliant, and painful show, and it’s so perfect that I stumbled on it just before this trip.

This trip was something I’d dreaded and hoped to avoid altogether. My ex and I bought a condo there in early 2022, and we had all these big plans to live bicoastally once my daughter graduated from high school. The way we’d stumbled on it was kismet; it was gorgeous and gorgeously located, and six months after we bought it, he proposed to me on the roof deck in front of our families over Thanksgiving weekend.

Then, in January of 2023, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of water dripping from the ceiling in our bedroom. Within hours, it was dripping into the second bedroom and the living room, too. We had to evacuate, remove all our furniture, and open up the walls and ceiling to find the source of the leak, which turned out to be the roof deck.

The last two years have been an endless tangle of insurance claims, lawyers, HOA meetings, and waiting on things over which we had no control to happen, which was frustrating enough when we were together but became a special form of torture after we broke up. Let’s just say there hasn’t been a single day in the last year that I haven’t had to say the Serenity Prayer.

Finally, repairs began last fall, and I felt like I needed to get there as we moved closer to completion. To put my eyes on it after two years. Get my belongings. Say goodbye to the dream of it. Prepare it for sale to someone else. And while I was in a much better place to do this than I had been at any point last year, I knew it wouldn’t be easy, logistically—there was a lot to do—or emotionally. So I asked my friend Mia to go with me.

We flew out early on Thursday morning and returned Sunday morning. A whirlwind trip, but one of those where somehow everything flowed seamlessly. We got all that needed to be done, done. Visited the handful of my favorite food spots on the block. Took a couple of walks in the sunshine. Even sat up on the roof deck—a place I hadn’t been able to think about in the past year without a hard pinch in my chest.

Mia, touching up cabinets, God bless her.

It was not convenient for Mia to come to California with me for two days. Like all my friends, she’s got a whole busy life. She has a full-time job, two kids, a dog that needs walking, and a house that’s under major construction. Asking her, or anyone else, to come with me was not something I’d have even considered a year ago, both because I wouldn’t have wanted to put someone out and because I was still living inside the idea that our dependence on one other is optional. But this year changed me in so many ways, and one of them is that I don’t take my friendships for granted anymore. I know—really know—how lucky I am to have these people in my life. And I’m all in on them until the end.

I’ve never been one to pull back from friendships when a relationship came along. Still, I hadn’t explicitly stated it as a priority that my friends would be an essential part of my relationship because they are an essential part of me. In my marriage, our friend groups merged and grew seamlessly, but since then, any potential or actual partners have been either a little or totally distinct from the life I share with my friends. That’s not something I want or will ever see as good enough again.

The main storyline in Somebody Somewhere is the friendship between Joel, played by Jeff Hiller, and Sam. Joel continually pushes the boundaries of Sam’s guarded heart, but eventually, she lets him in. However, when Joel finds a boyfriend, it breaks them. Like me (and most of us), Joel sees finding a partner as the holy grail, the necessary ingredient for all his biggest dreams—kids, a home, a Vitamix—to come true. Scene after scene, he finds himself living inside scenes he’d long dreamt of: moving into his boyfriend’s house, his boyfriend making him tea before bed, doing house projects, running errands, and going to church together, and instead of being fulfilled, he can’t stop crying.

On the plane ride home from San Diego, I watched the entire third season, and in the last episode—after Sam and Joel have finally reconnected—he says to her while they’re sitting in the car, “I mean, my life is so much better because of you. I think... I think you're my person, Sam. I know you are.”

These two.

When I tell you I cried. I didn’t stop for about forty-five minutes. Just a river of tears up there in the sky somewhere over Pennsylvania. Because it wasn’t that Joel and his boyfriend broke up or that he realized he didn’t want a relationship or any of the other things he’d dreamt of with a partner; he’d just come to see his friendship with Sam was as big a love story as any. Maybe even the best one.

Love,
Laura

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You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).

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1. I wrote about that friendship here.