Because I’m awful and hate myself, I spend a lot of time faffing on property websites, dribbling a fantasy football down the hallways of flats in St Leonards and into bedrooms that overlook the sea. I wasted a good 10 minutes studying an advert for a derelict old people’s home in Margate today, wondering if this could be it, the place I dreamed of. The plan was laid out some years ago, when it first became clear my generation was not destined to own the gardened houses we’d expected. The plan was for my friends to throw all our debt into one big pile, and build a community, but never call it that. A small block of flats, thick walls, all with really good wifi and overlooking a communal garden. The plan would extend to families, too. Friends would be able to have babies without a partner, because we would be their partner, without the sticky complication of sharing a bed.
In Canada, two women have just set a precedent by becoming legally recognised co-mothers of a boy, even though they are not a couple. Lynda Collins was granted a “declaration of parentage” after years of co-parenting seven-year-old Elaan, the profoundly disabled biological son of her best friend Natasha Bakht. This means Collins can make medical and legal decisions about Elaan’s care, should anything happen to Bakht. “When you have a child with disabilities, that fear is very prominent,” Bakht said. Theirs is a story that brings me much joy.
The greatest romances in the world are often platonic friendships, and yet, past 12, they get a fraction of the recognition of lovers. Reading to my daughter at night, friendships are the central thread of every story, and weighing on me is the knowledge they’ll be replaced by romantic love when we move to books without pictures. Romantic love is wonderful and all, but we wouldn’t find it half as fascinating if we didn’t have friends to dissect it with. Friendships are more subtle than their fancier counterparts, more welcoming of kindness and more honest, too. Whereas a husband is contracted to deny having fantasised, say, about an ex-colleague to his wife, there are no such white lies required in a friendship. If a friend asks whether an outfit suits her, she expects no more than a considered analysis of what it means to “embrace one’s curves”. Romantic love requires declarations and drama, it needs a pace to it, it needs projects to push it forward. Friendship is elastic, stretching easily over continents and decades, snapping back to the suburbs when required. Even hate is possible in a friendship, and overcomeable, as is rivalry and friction, and piss-takery and gloom. All of which would surely benefit parents, so often knocked off course by something as pedestrian as jealousy, or sex.
In friendships, every difficult truth is poured out and pored over, returned to for fun on long car rides. My friends and I have a series of stories that get funnier the more times we tell them. My partner disagrees. You judge: when we moved into our student house in Brighton, the hot water didn’t work. We called a plumber, who fiddled away with the boiler for a while, eventually coming downstairs wiping his hands, a little smirk on his face. He’d found something stuffed into the hot water pipe, and he’d uncorked it, so to speak, but he’d recommended we didn’t investigate further. The second he left, of course, we investigated further, and found, beside the tank, a very large, very realistic dildo. Sure it’s no Moth podcast but it has merit, doesn’t it? Either way, it’s not for you, it’s for us. It’s these memories that forged us into friendship and that we return to sporadically as if anniversaries of our becoming.
So many friendship groups form themselves into loose and loving families, it seems only logical that there should be scope to formalise them if required. News that Newcastle University has become the first facility to be granted permission to create babies using the DNA of three people only adds to my excitement. The concept of a family is evolving and improving. Rather than go alone, or settle for a single person with whom to trek along the dual carriageways of life, it’s possible to pick a team. There are a hundred ways to form a family. And while not all of them require the renovation of a retirement home in Margate, I already know exactly what I’d do with the kitchen.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
