"Babes" and the Best Friend's Loss

*mild spoiler alerts ahead*

I met my best friend when I was twelve years old. At the time, she was coping with rowdy, gripping amounts of grief. Meanwhile, I was maintaining the secrets of all the adults in my life and making a lot of noise to cover up that fact. We always say we could sense an intimate knowledge of loss in the other person, even at that age, so we moved toward each other with an unspoken, powerful magnetism. She had these royal blue Vans with tie-dye laces, one of the walls in her new house was painted into a massive chalkboard, and she was a self-proclaimed twenty one pilots fan. So yeah, she was effortlessly very cool in my eyes. I never left after I met her; we were undoubtedly destined to meet precisely when we did. We have been in sync much of our decade-plus-long friendship, taking differently sized steps but to the same rhythm. Over the years, she has fought and wrestled and bent over backwards to understand me when I was resistant and secretive. She has softened out my edges. I think I’ve made her braver. She celebrates my quirks and lets our differences breathe. I’ve known her half my life. I’ve come to believe we are permanent set pieces in each other’s lives.

My best friend recently married someone who she was- centuries ago- destined to meet, fall in love with, and commit to. It’s miraculous. I witnessed her closely through it all as she blossomed into this free person with an unapologetic and seemingly bottomless ability to love. I was possessive at first, afraid as I often am of getting left behind for something more dazzling and easy. I was young and inevitably selfish with what I believed to be scarce. When she was falling really deep into love with this person, I didn’t get it. Sometimes I still don’t, I must say. It’s a confusing and sloppy process accepting that the love she has for her husband is different from the one she reserves for me. I have to be cautious with these emotions, reminding myself “different” doesn’t necessarily mean less. I try to imagine the love I receive from her as an objectively different color than the love she gives to him. What I think is odd, though, is that partners, spouses, boyfriends are rarely attuned to this perceived scarcity. I don’t think they fear losing their partner to a best friend the way best friends brace for the loss of their friends to romance. It’s an assumption, a generalization, but in my experience, partners at most feel jealousy toward the best friend, but I don’t think they grip onto the fear of losing them quite like the best friend does.

How often do we hear anyone calling the sincere and full love spouses have for each other too much? Too reliant? Too intense? It’s true, deep, lifelong, profound, beautiful. Why is love given in equal measure and equal sincerity too much when it comes from a friend? Too dependent, suffocating. Even strange or ridiculous, and at best funny or eccentric. Of course you’d consult your spouse on whether or not to take that job or buy that house. Of course you’d move across the country to be closer to your immediate family after welcoming your first child. The togetherness of marriage, legal and perceived, makes these decisions mutually consequential for both. You share a life with your spouse. I am curious, though, why we use all this language strictly for marriage. Being legally bound by the state, having a sex life with each other, and maybe sharing a bank account are really the only things distinguishing the two relationships. I’ve known my best friend double the time her husband has known her. But I would not be first consulted in these choices she’d make for her life. Many would find this notion laughable, but it troubles me. Perhaps tangential, but the way I feel about accepting this version of the best friend role is oddly reminiscent of how I felt long ago being told to accept my role as a woman in the church. “Children’s ministry is just as important! We couldn’t do what we do without our secretary working behind the scenes! You are just an integral! It’s not the role with the loudest voice or the influence or the power or the microphone, but it’s just as sacred. Maybe it’s thankless, but it’s what God wants from you, so just press in on it!” I do not want to thanklessly accept a duller, quieter, oftentimes more silently challenging role with something I am just as committed to. I’m not jealous, it’s bigger than such a futile feeling. I’m wondering why we collectively operate this way when it doesn’t always make the most sense. I’m definitely not blaming my best friend. These standards are upheld pretty much by and for everyone, and I think it can hurt more than it can help.

I think best friends have to do a lot of policing of how they express and describe the love they have for their friends who are married or coupled off. Best friends are more often than not second tier. They are just beyond the outskirts looking in on the family as a witness, not a whole heartedly included member. Many of my relationships test this reality, I am happy to admit, as I’ve been welcomed in by friends’ families throughout my life, attending their Thanksgivings, birthdays, vacations, etc. But I am often confronted with the sinking grief that something within this dynamic is withheld from me simply because I don’t share a last name. On paper, I operate kind of like an in-law, someone married into the unit. But it doesn’t matter what’s scrawled on paper, the reality is I am not going to be allowed in the hospital room, I won’t be the emergency contact, the next of kin. Logistically, I won’t be in the list of obligatory consultants on where to relocate, when to have children, or where to be buried. Best friends show up in every single gap of these decisions with support, laughter, food, advice, dirty work, and commitment, but they aren’t in the decisions themselves. 

Personally speaking, I’m unsure if marriage is for me. Statistically, sure, I’m likely to get married. I’m not necessarily special, and I’m pretty okay with that. The idea of it just doesn’t seem like something I’d do, though. I’m open to my mind changing. This wariness or lack of certainty I have for the resonance of marriage is partially an obstacle to understanding my friends who are in love or hoping to be married. Other times, it really makes sense to desire marriage. Societal norms make it painful and dastardly lonely to be unmarried in all of life’s major events, and I want to be in it with someone as much as any one of my friends. But I’m just unsure, as of now, if the person I’m in it with should be a spouse. I have to wonder, then, if I do not eventually marry, who will be my next of kin? If I have children but don’t marry, who will be in the delivery room? If I’m sick, who will take me to the doctor? Who will pick me up from the airport? For the time being, the answer to all of these questions is obviously my friends. At this point in life, it’s easy to wave away my fears, but if I do not marry or have children, what will happen in our forties and fifties when my best friends have “their own families?” Of course I’m family now, but I think it’s reasonable to brace for the time when suddenly I'm not. 

I love my best friend’s husband. I love all the ways she’s changed since they met. He’s unembarrassed, capable, warm, a dedicated friend, and really hilarious. Her happiness in marrying him is entirely my happiness. And, much has changed since they got married. I recently visited and stayed the night at their house, and she did not sleep in the guest bed with me talking into the wee hours of the night as we once did just a year ago. Things are changing, and it’s all beautiful and purposeful and right, but the loss is undeniable. I often feel quite alone and aimless by these changes. 

I recently watched “Babes”, directed by Pamela Adlon and written by Ilana Glazer. “Babes” is about the simultaneously beaming joy and deafening grief of having a child and navigating friendship at the same time. Needless to say, I resonated. I really believe having a child is miraculous: it is absurd that women grow life from nothing within our bodies and have the fortitude and casual prowess to birth that life in the form of a tangible, separate human person. I feel a greedy sense of pride at having a body with that ungodly capacity to nourish and persevere, and I also feel an indescribable sense of fear and white-knuckled loss at the very same capacity. Not just for myself, but what it means for my friendships and the structure of life as I know it. The whole premise of “Babes,” for that reason, and how it was articulated really spoke to me. 

In the movie, Ilana Glazer’s character Eden becomes pregnant after a meaningful one night stand, and the movie catalogs her journey with the support of her best friend, Dawn. Dawn is married to Marty, and together they have two children, Tommy, and Melanie, who is hilariously and joyously born in the opening few minutes of the film. Throughout the movie, you watch Eden’s pregnancy and Dawn’s difficulties being a wife and mother expand and wane on their friendship. Eventually, Dawn and Eden embark on a weekend baby-moon getaway before Eden’s due date. On the trip, Eden shakily presents Dawn with her idea for her and her baby to move in with Dawn and her family. Dawn isn’t keen on the idea, and Eden is taken by surprise. Eventually, the two escalate into an argument confronting all the tensions left unspoken throughout the movie after Eden becomes pregnant. She lashes out and speaks to the very grief I’ve been reflecting and chewing on. She says, 

Best friends are so fucked over in adulthood. If we don’t couple ourselves off, we are fucked. Not everybody’s made up like that. I’ve known you twice as long as Marty. And a lifetime longer than Tommy and Melanie’s brand new ass. What, just because we’re not blood related, we’re not family? That’s bullshit. You and me, we’re family. We’re family. 

Dawn pauses, then replies: 

I have a family. 

My heart both swelled and sank in my chest when I watched this scene. I felt such a kindredness with Eden at that moment and the disappointment and anger she felt when she expectantly proposed this hopeful idea, only to be crushed by her friend’s reality. Earlier in the movie, Eden’s OBGYN suggests she hire a doula in case Dawn isn’t able to make it to the birth, and you see her deflate at the idea of a stranger being present for such an occasion rather than her soulmate. Meanwhile, Dawn is feeling alone, guilty, relieved, and overwhelmed about going back to worth after birthing her second child. So, Dawn is eager to escape the demands of husband and kids for time with Eden, but Eden is distracted feeling scared shitless and lonely at the impending birth of her own child. Dawn and her husband are contemplating moving to the suburbs, and Eden hides her hurt at not being asked about the decision to leave the city. The tension has been mounting and mounting to this moment of breakage. Both are right. Dawn is responsible for too many people’s needs. Eden needs support and comfort as she embarks on her parenting journey as a single person. This reality check that there is seemingly not enough left over for each other is “the best friend’s loss” in pure form. 

Later, the friends recover as friends do. The movie ends hopefully with the fanfare and mounting soundtrack of all our favorite romantic comedies. Dawn goes after her girl, abandoning her plans to be present for the birth of Eden’s baby, arriving in a limousine and everything. It’s hilarious and surreal. To my knowledge, many have called this movie too densely millennial, cringey and crude. I agree! I’m just not bothered by it. In fact, I enjoy the movie for those precise characteristics. The idiosyncrasies of my dearest friendships are perfectly cringey, I love Ilana Glazer’s post-2010s humor, and birth is entirely crude. Nameless criticisms aside, I love this movie for its portrayal of the hazy pain of growing up (and out), and the options we never talk about for including our friends as our partners in life. Eden and Dawn ebb and flow, sometimes with resistance and a lot of squirming, with the backdrop of their lives impacting the way they’re able to show up for each other. It makes me really nervous and sad for my own unknown future with friends, our potential partners and children, but it also gives me a lot of hope. 

As Eden and Dawn learned to do, I think we should take more opportunities to push back on the constraints we accept in our friendships as we become adults. Call me naive, but I am quite hopeful my best friend and I won’t succumb to the fate of losing each other to families that don’t even exist yet. With a lot of attention, care, honesty, and acceptance, I really believe there is enough to go around. Like Eden and Dawn, I will keep on making my own life’s choices with my best friends in mind. As we speak, I'm contemplating picking my life back up from where it currently resides to move closer to my best friends. Growing up is dastardly and startlingly lonely in many ways, making us into self-fulfilling prophecies of unnecessary loss at times. And, change is not a betrayal when there’s enough room to welcome it all. For me and mine, my friends are top tier, but that doesn’t mean I can’t expand that tier outward. Maybe “the best friend’s loss” is not the next destiny at hand. (Thank you, again, to Ilana Glazer for helping a girl cope!)