On Kissing And Fucking Your Friends

I get a lot of pushback when I say we should all be making out with our friends more often, though to be fair I think a good portion of this pushback is coming from close friends of mine who just don’t want to be making out with me specifically. Even beyond that, though, we’ve all been culturally taught to highly value the distinction between the “friend” relationship and the “lover” relationship, to the point that even the suggestion of behavior outside the norms prescribed by those relationships, such as, say, kissing your friends, is enough to elicit a negative response. “Friends aren’t for kissing,” our propagandized brains say, “lovers are for kissing. Friends are for playing Wii Bowling. Lovers are for physical intimacy, for sex and cuddling and hand stuff. Friends are for playing New Super Mario Brothers, on the Wii.”

I am 15 years old when I have my first first kiss, under a massive birch tree that has seen so many first dates its trunk is more initial than bark. I close my eyes as our lips meet, and when I pull away I can see that she’s looking at me nervously.

“Did you feel them?” she asks. “Sparks?”  I don’t really know what she means. The kiss was nice – her lips are very soft, and she’s very pretty – but there were no fireworks like in the movies. Besides, I’m deeply in love with her best friend, something everyone but her seems to already know. But there she is, waiting for an answer, and the kiss was really nice, and who says I have to be in love with someone to enjoy kissing them anyway, so

“Yeah,” I lie. “Sparks.” 

Like monogamy, gender, and fiat currency, the platonic/romantic distinction is a set of socially constructed categories – wild animals don’t have a concept of “friends with benefits.” We know that just because something is socially constructed doesn’t mean that it’s fake, or useless – a point many people on both sides of the political aisle seem to miss when debating the continued existence of other constructs like gender or monogamy. Money is a social construct – we’ve all just collectively agreed to assign value to small metal circles – but it still does something, we still need it to exist in society and interact functionally with each other. Gender is a social construct as well – the collection of social roles, behaviors, and expectations we’ve assigned to half the human race based on physical characteristics – and yet, for 90-plus percent of the population, gender maps on to sex pretty cleanly and makes existing in the world easier for them in many ways. Social constructs should, in principle, serve a purpose and have utility, and when we deconstruct them we should do so with the goal of understanding that utility.

What, then, is the utility of social categories like “friend” and “lover”? Like gender, the platonic/romantic distinction provides interpersonal shortcuts that allow people to engage with each other on a broad level. The shortcuts narrow down the range of possible interactions. Instead of being presented with every option at once, you choose a category that presents you with a more limited palate of options. From there, socialization continues to streamline with the help of other social categories – different genders have a set of approved interactions with each other, as do different social classes, ethnicities, even ages. With each additional category, the number of acceptable interactions shrinks, and the easier it is to know which behaviors are approved.  The semi-automation of human interaction.

However, like with monogamy, gender, and fiat currency, the ease-of-use afforded to us by the platonic/romantic distinction comes with some significant downsides. For one, it limits the range of acceptable ways to interact with your friends and/or lovers. Kissing is fun, and it’s often even more fun when you’re kissing someone you care about. Conversely, being friends with someone means growing emotionally close to them, and the list of ways to express intimacy to a friend in a world with a strictly enforced platonic/romantic distinction is shockingly short. Kissing is a more powerful and direct expression of intimacy and affection than anything generally considered permissible in a platonic friendship, and when behaviors like that get relegated exclusively to romantic relationships it creates a hierarchy that places romantic relationships above platonic relationships. It also just makes it harder to effectively communicate how much you love your friends in a socially acceptable way.

I am 17 years old when I have my second first kiss, with the person I have been madly in love with for five years, through all of middle school and into high school. We’re sitting in their car, in a secluded corner of a darkened parking lot. This time, I do feel sparks – big erratic jolts bouncing their way around my chest and up into my throat. Oh, I think. I get it now. This must be it. They must be the one. 

We’ll date for the next three years. When, a year and change into our relationship, I catch feelings for someone else, it feels like my world is shattering. Love is something fragile and scarce – a finite resource. This new love must come from somewhere, must mean I’m loving my partner less. I’m a bad person and a bad partner, selfish and thoughtless with my love, with this precious thing that I’ve let haphazardly slip through my fingers. I push the feelings down and out of sight.

Relying on cultural shortcuts to socialize can often encourage poor interpersonal skills, and engender an inability to treat people like individuals. I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy over the past three or four years learning to communicate  my own needs effectively, as well as understanding that other people’s behavior is almost never actually about me. This means radically accepting (yay for DBT buzzwords) that everyone else is a fully-realized human being with their own shit going on, and being compassionate and understanding of that other human being’s flaws and mistakes. It’s been a long, slow process for me, and one that’s involved actively retraining my brain to not rely on the shortcuts provided to me by social categories. Instead of thinking “this person is my friend, therefore they must be thinking/doing this,” or “this person and I are romantically involved, therefore they must be thinking/doing this,” I think instead “this person is a person and they have a whole life that I can’t see,” and then I either ask them directly what they’re thinking or doing, or I cut them some slack and accept that they have other stuff going on. 

While the social shortcuts provided by these categories might sometimes simplify things, in reality they also add guesswork – we choose from a set of predetermined behaviors/interactions based on our established relationship category and make assumptions about the other person’s experience, instead of engaging with them as a person and actually communicating healthily. Kissing your friends can engender healthier communication practices, in much the same way that polyamorists argue nonmonogamy, practiced healthily, can assuage feelings of jealousy, codependence, and possessiveness (The Ethical Slut describes a ‘clean love,’ free from clinginess, jealousy, or expectation). Communication, in turn, allows for setting clear boundaries, being more present and direct in every relationship, and avoiding guesswork and misunderstanding.

These social categories also inevitably end up reinforcing the same ciscentric, heteropatriarchal structures that we (fags) have worked so hard to challenge. This is the other type of utility that these constructs continue to serve – upholding sociopolitical power structures that allow the dominant in-groups to retain their status. In a heteropatriarchal society, men date women and women date men, and therefore men are friends with other men, and women are friends with other women. It’s the same criticism that polyamorists have of monogamy, and that gender abolitionists have of the gender binary: gender and monogamy reinforce heteropatriarchy, which reinforces monogamy and gender, and around and around it goes, like a misogynistic ouroboros (though obviously in real life all snakes are feminists). There is probably also an argument to be made that much of our cultural tendency to relegate physical intimacy to only one social category and to embrace being bummed out in some moral rejection of ““hedonism,”” is rooted in Christian puritanism, but I don’t know enough about Christianity to speak on that and I refuse to learn. 

I am texting my friend Sadie (first kiss #22, nine months earlier). “Had a big revelation tonight,” she says. It’s one in the morning and we are both transgender, so this is to be expected. “The love I feel for my friend had me feeling like our kiss meant more than it did to me just because I haven’t had such an intimate t4t friendship before. Those feelings are really fucking big and confusing. I got scared by them and then was able to process today.”

“Duuuuuuuude,” I say, because I’m stoned and because Sadie and I are both dude-positive, “100 percent! It’s a much more expansive way of letting yourself feel love for everyone! And when you’re used to love of that size only meaning being in love it’s scary!”

“God that’s exactly it,” she says.  “It was really scary. It started to feel a lot better once I realized that it doesn’t mean we’re in love, that I don’t want more than they do, that I’ve just never been a sapphic little poly tgirl before and it’s ok to want to be seen in a physical way.”

“‘Being seen in a physical way’ is EXACTLY RIGHT! It’s all about being WITNESSED!” I say. Then I send a gif of Nux from Mad Max: Fury Road. “Tgirl icon.”

Each of these social constructs has a vested interest in upholding the others – the less divergence there is in any one area, the more shortcuts there are overall and the easier everything is to navigate in the short term. Patriarchy is, at its core, about creating hierarchies and giving everyone a role to fill, making things easier and simpler, in order to cement the supremacy of the dominant class within each hierarchy. Like the rest of these structures, the platonic/romantic distinction supports and reinforces all these other categorizations and allows people to be more easily sorted into their respective bubbles. By kissing your friends, you begin to disrupt the societal automation that allows for patriarchy and compulsory cisheterosexuality. Instead, you contribute to a culture of interpersonal engagement that prioritizes genuine, honest communication.

That these social constructs work to uphold each other is evidenced by the simple fact that the farther anyone diverges from what society deems the “default person” (ie a cisgender heterosexual white man) in any one way, the more all the structures start to crumble. Non-monogamous relationships are more prevalent in queer communities than in straight ones for this reason – once you begin to question one social norm like heterosexuality, questioning the rest is almost inevitable. Even cishet women are granted more leniency than cishet men when it comes to which types of intimacy are permitted between “platonic” friends – physical intimacy, like cuddling, hand holding, even hugging, is allowed girls but not boys (when boys hug it’s gay).

I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing that all friends should kiss, nor am I arguing that friendships that don’t involve physical intimacy are in some way less close or less meaningful than those that do. Nobody is ever obligated to kiss anyone they don’t want to kiss. In fact, in this new paradigm, some relationships may even become more intimate by not kissing. Physical intimacy is the easiest example to follow, but the platonic/romantic distinction also gatekeeps emotional intimacy behind “romantic” relationships. A world where you can kiss your friends is also a world where it’s easier to be honest and vulnerable with everyone in your life, to be present and receptive in relationships – to love your friends.

I am 22 years old when I have my 20th first kiss, with an unfairly hot man from work, sprawled out on a picnic blanket in the small park near his apartment. 

“What do I have to do to get you to kiss me already,” I ask, half joking, barely ten minutes into the date.

“Ella!” he says, laughing. “So impatient!” But a few minutes later he kisses me anyway, and we roll around in the grass for a while before a pair of trans people walk quickly past us.

“Ugh, straight people,” says one to the other, and we laugh hysterically and kiss some more. We’ll start dating then, casually at first and then slightly less casually – though in a non-monogamous relationship where both of you are trans and queer and Going Through It the word “casual” stops really communicating anything useful. We both kiss and flirt with and occasionally fuck other people, and the dearth of presumptive expectations forces us to talk about our feelings and articulate our wants and needs.

Almost a year later, he looks up at me over the novel he’s reading. “I like that we can go back and forth between planning our wedding that isn’t happening and feeling like there are no stakes at all. It’s nice, you know?” 

I laugh and poke his cheek, which makes him flinch. I do know, and I love him so much I can’t think straight sometimes. “Yeah, it is nice.”

There has been a push by some on the internet to label relationships that express intimacy in ways not easily defined by the platonic/romantic binary as “queerplatonic.” According to the LGBTA Wiki, “queerplatonic” relationships bend the rules for telling apart romantic relationships from non-romantic relationships. The Wiki goes on to explain that “queerplatonic” is most commonly used by the asexual and aromantic communities, as a term to describe their desire for, in asexuals’ case, emotionally intimate relationships that don’t involve sexual intimacy, and in the aromantics’ case, physically intimate relationships that don’t involve romantic intimacy.

With all due respect to those communities, I think “queerplatonic” is dumb as hell. 

To begin with, inventing new words to describe “standard behaviors but performed by gay people” contributes to a recent cultural trend that seeks to over-taxonomise the queer experience. Not every concept needs its own term, and in fact oftentimes attempting to confine ideas to a single word can limit what that idea is attempting to express. The same phenomenon can be seen in the infamous Tumblr Gender List that provided fodder for so many 2015-era anti-SJWs. While as a trans person I obviously understand that the experience of gender is a deeply personal one that’s unique to every individual, that doesn’t mean that each of those experiences needs its own brand-new word. In fact, creating a new gender category to describe a very niche gender experience necessarily makes every other category more restrictive, since the implied second half of the statement “this category describes this thing” is “these other categories do not describe this thing.”

In this way the phrase “queerplatonic” is actually antithetical to its goal of normalizing non-standard relationship models. Instead of blurring the lines between platonic and romantic, “queerplatonic” draws new lines, and says “actually, this group of behaviors isn’t allowed in either the friend or lover category, let alone both.” A new category is created, new shortcuts are devised, and the number of acceptable behaviors allocated to each category shrinks, not grows. This is, when it comes down to it, an abolitionist argument – if a set of categories is restrictive we shouldn’t seek to add one more category to the list but to abolish the set altogether. Not only that, but kissing your friends and abolishing the platonic/romantic distinction actually serves the asexual & aromantic communities better than a new category could. In a world with no “friend” and “lover” categories, where everyone set boundaries and terms with each other individually, a relationship that involved emotional intimacy but no physical intimacy wouldn’t be treated as out of place as it is in today's compulsorily heteromonogamous one.

Some might argue that the queerplatonic route can also lead to abolition. “If we keep on creating new categories ad infinitum,” they might say, “eventually the system will be overwhelmed and all the categories will become meaningless.” This argument is more commonly used to defend the aforementioned Tumblr Gender List and xenogenders as a concept altogether, but it applies just as well here. It can feel like an effective and satisfying plan of attack, since it’s praxis you can achieve on your own without anyone else. Unfortunately, this isn’t how systems work – a large number of new, tiny categories won’t really impact the binary as a whole, and will be utterly incomprehensible to any outside not already in the know (because of how language and communication rely on shared understanding). It’s a very neoliberal, individualist approach to changemaking, one that elevates the self as the only agent of change as opposed to encouraging community and genuine human connection, and one that inevitably leads to the splintering of communities into smaller and smaller groups based on nicher and nicher microcategories.

I am neither arrogant nor slutty enough to believe that my escapades will be the thing to tear down western cultural hegemony. Nor do I believe that this model of intimacy and relationship-building is as integral to my identity as my transness or my sexuality, and while I think other relationship models have certainly been prioritized or imposed, I would never presume to compare that to the active oppression historically directed toward the queer community. What I would do, am doing, is to argue that normalizing kissing and fucking your friends works towards a world that allows for a kinder, more considerate way to be in relation with the people you love. Love can be something inexpressibly expansive, a painful, intricate, ongoing, everchanging dialogue between people that makes you say sappy shit like “a painful, intricate, ongoing, everchanging dialogue.” To limit who we can feel that love for, and how we can feel it, based on outdated and unhelpful rules, seems like a waste of time to me.

Making this paradigm shift will probably be hard. To be vulnerable and present while still having healthy boundaries in every interpersonal relationship, without relying on social categories and their convenient shortcuts, is a lot of work, work that requires humility and a copious amount of self-reflection. Getting to a world where that’s the default will take time and effort. But in a world where that’s the default, maybe it won’t be so much work anymore, because being vulnerable and present will just be what everyone is taught to do. And conversely, in a world where setting boundaries one-on-one is the default, maybe physical intimacy doesn’t have to actually be a big deal, if you don’t want it to be. Maybe you can kiss your friends and have nothing about the relationship change at all. “Sometimes,” as my friend Agnes says, “you just want to fuck your homies and then go get breakfast after.”

I am 23 years old when I have my 34th first kiss, with a very pretty nonbinary person I keep running into at the bar down the street from my apartment. We’re sitting in the courtyard out back behind the bar. I have been talking about this essay I’m working on about kissing your friends and how it’s taking forever because I’m lazy and bad at writing, and they have just informed me that they’re falling in love with their best friend, which makes me so happy I want to shout into the sky. I’m standing in line for karaoke when they tap me on the shoulder to tell me they’re leaving. I go to hug them, and then

“Can I kiss you goodbye?”

They smile, which crinkles their nose, and I smile. 

“Yeah,” they say. For sure.” 

We kiss, and their lips are very soft, and then they leave, and I smile again. In a week I am going to a wedding with my boyfriend, tomorrow I am waking up at 5:30 to go to work. The person ahead of me in line for karaoke screlts out “American Idiot.”

“Cool.”

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