I Wanted to Crave Him👅 Not Have Him
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| Nothing More than a kiss! |
One of the most intimate relations in Chinese culture is known as the “zhiji” — the “know-self,” one who knows you like you know yourself. This is a connection outside of any social role, something beyond even the best friendship, like a platonic soul mate. The Chinese describe the feeling a know-self inspires as different from friendly, romantic, or familial feelings: It is considered a fourth kind of feeling.
It is friendship with a certain spark, but not quite romance — the ideal spiritual relationship.
In a song whose title translates to “Blue Know-Self,” the Chinese singer Chen Rui sings about a feeling that is “Not the clinging of a lover but lingering like wine.” Not oceanic passion but “a faint yearning, like a small blue river with tiny waves.”
My know-self and I met at a summer writing camp where we spent four hours a day, five days a week, for six weeks, reading and commenting on each other’s writing. Everybody in our workshop knew that he and I loved each other’s stories, which meant we loved each other’s souls.
I knew from the beginning that he had a long-term partner and that it was not possible between us, in the traditional way. But we got close. Know-selves are rare: The ancient Chinese believed that finding even one in the world was more difficult than finding 10,000 pieces of gold.
Friends forever, we promised each other. He did not keep our closeness a secret from his partner. I did not need to keep it a secret from anyone, and yet our mutual affection felt strange to me: I did not know what to do with the bigness of it. I wanted to support his loving, monogamous relationship of 15 years, about which he only said good things, not threaten it. And yet our closeness felt precarious, still.
I have lost platonic friends to marriages before, and this felt more than platonic, though less than romantic. I wanted to find a precedent for it, but even among my unconventional friends, I couldn’t find a model of the kind of intimacy I wanted that did not involve sex, dating or polyamory.
The origin of platonic love wasn’t defined by sexlessness; it was defined foremost by love. What we call platonic now was actually the highest rung of Plato’s Ladder of Love, which ran from lowly love of the earthly to love of the celestial — love in its most spiritual form.
My know-self and I both wanted this celestial love, to sublimate our summer crush feelings into something pure. After all, according to C.S. Lewis in “The Four Loves,” in which he describes the traditional Greek notions of storge, philia, eros and agape (family, friend, erotic and godly love), it is not so impressive to love someone you already like. It is more impressive, divine even, to resist your dislike for someone and love them anyway. If true, wouldn’t it be extremely impressive to resist romance with someone who sparks romantic feelings and loves them in a godlier way?
We wanted to miss each other and to see each other occasionally when I visited my best friend, who had conveniently moved to a city close to where he lived. What I wanted was something in between that could remain in between. I have always liked the craving more than the having, Christmas Eve over Christmas morning.
And after all, amid all the warnings of how romance dies after two years, and how passion in marriages wanes, it can seem that friendship, especially friendship with an unfulfilled yearning, is the better deal. I have another friend who others think I am dating because of what we do at parties: cuddle, and gaze into each other’s eyes. “Let’s never ever get together,” we say. “The better deal,” we say. Because this is better than dating.
A recent Ezra Klein podcast episode — “What Relationships Would You Want If You Believed They Were Possible?” — introduced the idea of people who are invariably in your life. Often this includes families and especially spouses, the constants you make major life decisions with or around. Yet why should friends be mere loose variables?
Rhaina Cohen, who wrote “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center,” spoke on the podcast about how there is no term for a relationship that transcends the conventional language for friendship (“zhiji,” I want to tell her, though even “zhiji” is more a recognition of the soul than a prioritizing of circumstances). Ms. Cohen described a friend who lives in an intentional co-living community who acknowledged the complications of such a life but chooses “the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection.”
I wanted to be among his invariables. But his wife was already his invariable, and after a few months of daily texting — months in which we truly were friends but were making plans to see each other briefly over the holidays — she felt hurt by our closeness, and he did not want to hurt her.
What I wanted were the problems of finding a way to keep our connection — perhaps I could meet and even befriend her? — but he did not think those problems were an option. Now we no longer contact each other at all. And I see how this is good of him: a keeping of boundaries, an honoring of his partner’s needs. I see how it is his gift to her, not a sacrifice. But I also see how this gift could be part of the bias of a culture that prioritizes the choosing of one relationship over all others. And when it becomes simply what one is supposed to do, the gift can turn into the mere paying of a debt.
I am hopelessly biased, of course: conflict of interest, etc. It is difficult to separate my ideological beliefs from my personal desires. All relationships are built on boundaries that both keep in and keep out. I had wanted an in-betweenness, but perhaps only because we couldn’t and didn’t cross the traditional boundaries.
If it weren’t for the circumstances, we might have fallen into a conventional romance. I’m afraid I’m only trying so hard to find an ambiguous fourth category for us because I don’t want this to be a typical story of thwarted love. In that story, I would simply be the other woman, pining.
I once opened a long-term monogamous relationship after officiating a wedding in Shanghai for two friends who had been polyamorous together for seven years. I had wanted to explore nonmonogamy for a while by then, but my partner at the time felt that true love meant not needing anyone else. The wedding, though, made it clear how much this couple loved each other, even as their bridesmaids and grooms, unbeknown to their traditional Chinese parents, were mostly comprised of once-upon-a-Tinder dates.
When my partner agreed to try opening, he said, “I don’t love you for who I want you to be. I love you for who you are.” But for someone who believed love meant not needing anyone else, he proceeded to date much more than I did. I didn’t want frequent, new, exciting connections; I just wanted to be able to get close to the extraordinary ones.
My best friend has an ex of 10 years who is like family to her. She no longer wants to be with anyone who won’t accept his presence in her life. She does not care to have more than one romantic connection at a time — she and her ex are no longer romantic — but she wants to keep this unconventional attachment. He is her know-self; he is invariable.
I still don’t know if I am monogamous or polyamorous; it depends on the person and circumstance. I can imagine being sexually exclusive to one person, but I can’t imagine being emotionally exclusive. What I know is that I am tired of being a variable. I would love a life partner, but I wonder how I would explain my “better deal” and how I want to live in a commune one day with my friends and help raise my best friend’s children, come what problems that may.
And if my know-self and I ever figure out a friendship, I would have to explain to him, too, this person with whom I feel mutual longing does👀👀👅 not need the longing to become something. This is more than nothing but less than something else. What is the name for that? Perhaps it is better unnamed.
All I know is that I want a connection that can hold all of that.
The New York Times
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