A friendship can mean just as much as a marriage, so why don’t we celebrate them too?

I love asking close friends how they met. In our romantic relationships, the practice of sharing the stories of our firsts – first texts, first dates, first dances, first anniversaries – loudly, proudly and publicly isn’t just encouraged, but often expected.

Nerida Ross (above left) and Maddison Costello have celebrated their friendship with an “uncivil ceremony”.

However, when it comes to friendship, these memories can be left untold, sitting silent in our chests, recounted only in the occasional birthday speech or wedding toast. Beyond these rare moments, when we’re granted permission to speak about how a friendship unfolded, we ignore our friendship love stories – even when they prove themselves to be more long-lasting and life-affirming than the relationships we have with the people we date or even marry.

Nerida Ross and Maddison Costello met at university while taking the same art history course. At the time, Nerida referred to Maddi as her “theatre friend” after they fell into a habit of going to plays together – something none of their other friends ever wanted to do.

As they neared the end of their studies, they each shared that they’d been wanting to go overseas on one last big trip before starting full-time work. They decided to do it together. “I remember saying to one of my high-school best friends, ‘I barely know this person – we’re just theatre friends and we’re about to go on a three-month trip together,’” Nerida says.

Any concerns were soon put to rest as they explored Mexico, Colombia and Cuba. While travelling, Maddi lost her phone, then Nerida lost her passport and wallet. By the end of the trip they joked that they’d become two halves of one whole. With Maddi unable to contact anyone and Nerida without any money, they shared one phone and one credit card for the remainder of their trip.

When they returned home, Maddi and Nerida became inseparable. They started DJing together at least twice a week and became a kind of package deal in their personal lives, too – if Maddi was invited somewhere, so was Nerida, and vice versa. It wasn’t uncommon for them to arrive at a dinner party and be the only non-romantic couple invited.

“I told her that if I get married to anybody it will be a sad day, no matter how perfect it is. And she just said to me, ‘Don’t worry, we can have a wedding and it will be the best.’”

NERIDA ROSS

When they started DJing at weddings, their weekends involved long drives and conversations – many about the strangers’ weddings they’d just attended. Both working in production, Maddi and Nerida always had opinions about everything to do with event spaces, lighting, speeches, music and catering. And, most of the time, their opinions were the same. If they were ever to throw a wedding, they agreed it would be epic.

When I ask Maddi and Nerida why they decided to throw a “friend wedding” for themselves, affectionately known as their “uncivil ceremony”, they tell me different versions of how it came to be. For Maddi, it was those hundred little conversations about weddings that led them to the idea that if they hosted one, it would be perfect.

For Nerida, the moment is more specific. After her dad died, she would often find herself crying behind the DJ booth during wedding speeches, even when she didn’t know the couple getting married. One night, following the particularly beautiful wedding of a mutual friend, Nerida tells me she went back to the accommodation she was sharing with Maddi and broke down.

“I was telling her that I was just so sad, because my dad will never be at a wedding that I have,” says Nerida. “I told her that if I get married to anybody it will be a sad day, no matter how perfect it is. And she just said to me, ‘Don’t worry, we can have a wedding and it will be the best.’”

The uncivil ceremony, which was somewhere between a joke and an earnest celebration of their friendship, was held to coincide with Nerida’s and Maddi’s 30th birthdays. They planned a party of epic proportions, inviting 150 family and friends to Nerida’s mum’s house, where they’d laid out chequered flooring, built a stage and organised for a friend’s seven-piece band to play.

When planning the party, both Maddi and Nerida agreed they wanted their wedding to feel heartwarming, but also to still be quite funny. They decided the theme of the party would be “wedding” so everyone could dress as a bride, bridesmaid or wear a suit if they wanted to. “It was really fun and took a little bit of the focus off us,” Maddi says.

Nerida wore a navy-blue suit with embroidered flames on the sleeves, while Maddi wore a strapless black dress with opera gloves, each adorned with a giant baby-blue bow. While there wasn’t a ceremony per se, there were speeches and a cake. As a surprise, Nerida asked her mates in the band to write a song for Maddi, which was played early in the night.

Falling in line with their birthdays, the wedding also happened weeks before Nerida moved from Australia to Canada. “With the timing, particularly for me, it really felt like a public commitment,” Maddi says. “It was like, even though we’re not going to be in the same place, I am saying to myself and to everyone that this is a really important relationship that I’m going to work on and keep in my life. It was nice to be able to do that.”

“I am saying to myself and to everyone that this is a really important relationship that I’m going to work on and keep in my life.”

MADDISON COSTELLO

Despite more people choosing to reject the tradition of marriage, our romantic relationships are still at the centre of modern life. Today, marriage is an automatic recognition of someone’s next of kin and a right hard-fought for by members of the queer community. But the more I speak to people about their friendships, the more my feelings about the romance, intimacy and love we can wrap our friends in are validated.

The idea that grand acts of commitment and adoration should be saved only for those we’re in a sexual relationship with seems more stifling the longer I think about and pay attention to the tenderness of my own friendships. While polyamory, ethical non-monogamy and asexuality each challenge the bounds of platonic and romantic love, for the most part, society still has rigid rules as to who is allowed to show love to whom.

Our hesitation to show affection to our closest friends is something Dr Marisa G. Franco writes about in her book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends. “We are petrified to express love for our friends because if we do, we risk accusations of being attracted to them,” she writes. “But this muddling reveals our collective confusion as to different forms of love.”

What Franco is really touching on is how homophobia and heteronormativity’s influence on our friendships – particularly evident in the lack of a label for close male friends (“boyfriends”, unlike “girlfriends”, isn’t typically used to refer to platonic relationships) – has created a hesitation to show physical affection to people we don’t want to appear sexually attracted to. And while the acceptance of different sexualities and gender identities has made great progress in the last decades, for many of us heteronormativity still has an impact on who we feel we’re allowed to be close to.

When I speak to people about their closest friendships, love is the undercurrent of every conversation. The more we love our friends, the more they can frustrate, inspire or disappoint us. The love we feel for our very best friends may be different from the love we feel for a partner, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less real or any less important. And when partners feel threatened by this love, it’s down to the misunderstanding that different kinds of love can’t coexist.

So, why is the love we have for our friends consistently placed second to romantic love? Why do we focus so much on finding “the one” when there is so much love we can show to our friends, who can reciprocate that love whether we’re single, in a relationship or nursing a bruised heart?

If all kinds of love – platonic, romantic, sexual – are equal, and can exist independent of one another or happily overlap, perhaps it’s time to reconsider how we balance the scales.

Edited extract from Just Friends (Ultimo Press) by Gyan Yankovich, out January 31.

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