Photo courtesy of the author. By Emily D’Achiardi.

What Lies between Romantic and Maternal Love?

for Angellina 

She finds sleep easily and often earlier than me. Like a child, she wiggles and flails her limbs, arms above head, a pink camisole exposing the skin of her belly and cleavage. I come in at night to return her things and look at her one last time before I find sleep. But the closing door wakes her nose first and she sniffs me out, knowing it is me before even opening her eyes. The girl in the bed tells me to come closer, to join her. She curls around my body and presses her heat against the coolness of my skin. I pretend to find rest. I lay my hand too far up the meat of her thigh and she presses her pelvis hard onto the bone of mine. I feel myself become sticky for her. Feel myself become animal. This she does not know but acutely senses and we make love for the first time.

Our relationship ends as fast as it begins and then begins again a year later, when we tell each other we got it wrong the first time, we were meant to be friends. We were meant to be mothers and sisters. When I do not find sleep, she massages the spot between my shoulder blades, my lower back, and my neck, telling me where I am tight and carefully avoiding touching me in ways that may remind us of who we were to each other one year prior. I make her breakfast while she showers, yelling at her when it is ready and watching her scurry over, hair dripping into toast and eggs or oatmeal and banana. She washes my hair and back, scrubbing in small circular motions, holding the nape of my neck. There is an undeniable closeness, a sweetness and tenderness that is not usual in friendship. And we are mothers to each other—we take care of one another through the most generous and maternal acts.

I wrote a poem for her in class with the line:

You know I throw tantrums when my words are too hard to chew on myself but you still put me to bed and tuck me in; roll me and mold me, touch me and hear me.

To this, my professor questioned me on the relationship between the speaker and addressee, curious if the relationship is maternal, romantic, sexual, or just platonic friendship. Though I responded swiftly and assured them that the poem is about friendship, I left that meeting with uncertainty that the poem is not also about maternal love, romantic moments, or sexual remnants left behind. 

The truth of the matter is that I have found much of the romance in my life through my female friendships. And she is only one of many. Female friendships, the intimate kind, are the ones that are written about in length in literature—Toni Morrison’s Sula, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and even Nella Larsen’s Passing all explore relationships that reveal the complications of the self and the body when one shares such intimacy with another person. It is competitive and ferocious while being loving and tender. It is safety and resentment. It is exploring your own body through the learning of another’s, and it is, in its very complexity and beauty, romantic. There is a mystery to the sweetness and tenderness that two girls give each other. It is a departure from the norm and thus it becomes stirring. It is a heart rate quickening before it slows into comfort; it is an almost desperate need to see her, to chat with her, to lay next to her; it is romance that lives in the anomaly.

Holding her friend in her own hands, in the shower, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the private spaces of the home, she finds an opportunity to hold someone the way she wishes she could be held, was held, or will be held by the very girl in front of her. She finds an opportunity to hold herself and receive the comfort she gives through her generosity. She finds patience and acceptance for her friend and her friend’s body that she had yet to permit for herself. She quickly finds a mothering role and a childish role, caretaking and being taken care of in ways that mirror or deviate from the girls’ own relationships with their mothers. The two girls exchange a love that is selfless and generous while subconsciously participating in a process of self-healing and self-discovery through the female friend’s body.

This exchange is inherently maternal in the very acts that are being given and received: caretaking, cooking, feeding, cleaning her body, putting her to sleep, wiping her tears, and protecting her. Yet at the same time, there is a crucial mother-daughter power dynamic that is broken down: one of them has not come from the other’s womb, the age gap is likely small or nonexistent, and there are no financial responsibilities or dependencies at stake. This opens the relationship up more than it already is, granting the girls even more space to be free with one another, play and fight with one another, and be curious about each other’s bodies, ultimately creating a sense of romance that lingers throughout these female friendships.

I have often heard the women in my life say they feel their female friendships grant them all that is expected or needed from a romantic partner, often asking, What am I supposed to ask for from my romantic partner if my best friend already gives me everything I need?, or, Will I ever find someone who gives me that warm buzzing feeling I get when I am with my best friends? Besides the sexual, which can become blurred and offered when the friendship is homoerotic, female friendships walk an intimate line of friendship, romance, and maternal care that often offers the girls all of the love, support, and care that they might require or that our culture has deemed necessary from a romantic partner. This is not only why the loss of a female friendship is often more heartbreaking than the loss of a lover but also why women and girls may lower their standards for romantic partners (particularly men) as their needs and standards are already being met elsewhere, though that is for a different essay.

Aside from the kind of dreamy, mysterious, idealistic romance that lingers throughout these friendships, intimate female friendships have also recently been credited for their routines and commitment that often mirror those of a romantic relationship. Rhaina Cohen writes in an article for The Atlantic: “Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in the same houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex.” Not only are intimate female friendships feeling like romantic partners but they are also acting like romantic partners.

Thus, female friendship becomes not only a space for maternal love but also a kind of romantic love as well, ultimately challenging and deconstructing the various forms of love (romantic, familial, and platonic) that our culture has structured and labeled. As this occurs throughout the intimacy of the relationship, there quickly becomes something queering about these relationships. Not only can the friendships become homoerotic, but they also grant women and girls the opportunity to play all roles at once (mother, daughter, husband, wife, brother, and sister) without consideration for gender, age, or other structured roles within a culture. They allow women and girls to expand their very personhood and find power and agency in the intimacy of a friendship, in the intimacy of another female’s body. If camp, as Suan Sontag writes in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” is the triumph of the epicene style, then this kind of female friendship is camp and is queer in the ways in which it exists at a peak or a triumph of qualities of all and none simultaneously. Qualities of both sexes and neither, most obviously from Sontag’s definition, but also of both mother and daughter and neither, of lover and friend as well as neither.

The poem I wrote for class is queer not because it is about a woman I loved and written by a woman. It is queer because my professor needed to ask about the nature of the relationship; because it is of the epicene style. Because it is a love that deviates from the norm; because it is a kind of anomaly that a woman may find a love with another that is self-healing and self-revelatory. The girl in the poem revealed to me who I was before I even knew. Simply through the listening and the mirroring, I saw aspects of who I was in her and suddenly felt worthy of love. The poem ends, Tell me what it is like to be me. She serves as a constant gentle reminder of who I am and all that there is to love.

Our idea of androgyny, or of epicene, begins with the sexes and leaks into gender and clothing and art, but I do not see it ending there. Androgyny finds its way into the roles of our culture, and thus the roles in which we love someone, due to the very fact that gender has found its way into all of the crooks of our lives. If we can love someone with the triumph of epicene then we can love someone without fear; we can love them (and ourselves) wholly.


An earlier version of this essay appeared on Mia’s Substack, which you can subscribe to here.