Romantic Friendship in the 19th Century

I just recently finished the book "Cold Mountain", a book concerning several people in the South during the Civil War (as a side note, I found the storyline about the man kind of dull and overcooked - I am curious is me and my proclivities, or if other people felt this way?). Two of these people, Ada and Ruby, are women living in a little town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's deep into the war, at the point when almost all men are engaged in the war, and the women are, as it were, left behind doing the work they've always done, plus the work, in their case, of running a farm. Ada is a former rich girl who has no idea how to do these practical things, Ruby is a sort of societal cast-off with an amazing (and let me say, deeply intriguing) drive to work, who moves in on equal terms with Ada, to co-run the large farm Ada has ended up with on her hands and let fall into disarray. The two grow extremely close, both of them, in many ways, teaching the other how to live an adult life, in different ways. This aspect of the book I found very moving. At one point after Ada (inevitably) finds the man, who was her fiance before he went off to war, there is a moving scene, understated, and sad, where Ruby tells Ada that she doesn't need to marry the man, that they can run the farm without him. Ada tells her that she knows, but the she wants the man. And Ruby smiles quietly, and sets up for them to have a bit of time alone together.

Reading the scene was the most powerful moment in the book, because I could feel how palpably Ruby wanted things to stay just as they were, particularly because Ruby, a child born in abject poverty and forced to shift for herself all her life really has no other moment in the whole book where she lets her guard so completely down. She is, in a very valid way, a woman deeply in love, who knows that their relationship won't stay the way it is.

But, and this is what was so powerful to me, when I say in love, I don't mean romantically, not at all. She is sad things are falling apart, but I never feel like she is jealous, per se, of the man, or that she is attracted to Ada in a physical way. The relationship is what we now call 'only platonic'. I think the 'only' in this is a sad reflection of our times.

Before the latter half of the 19th century, it was actually remarkably common for people to have deep, powerful friendships with people of the same sex. It's interesting, because historians read the artifacts of these friendships now, and the assumption is, frequently, that the relationship was homosexual. Abraham Lincoln is an excellent example. Lincoln and his friend, Joshua Speed, spent years sharing a bed, and remained lifelong friends, exchanging letters that, in many ways, feel more like what we think of as love letters than anything he ever exchanged with Mary Todd. Emily Dickinson's life-long devotion to her sister-in-law is another example, or Shakespeare's many poems written to an unknown man or men.

This is not to denigrate or disprove the many historians who suggest that some of these relationships were sublimated homosexual relationships, or even covers for actual physical relationships. I imagine this happened at the time. At the same time, I think that some of them WEREN'T romantic relationships. And I think that's wonderful (as a sidenote, I would suggest that some of the poems written about women by men, and vice-versa, may similarly have been the admiration between extremely close friends).

Such a relationship cannot exist easily anymore, of course. A man hugging a man now is a joke, a byword, something funny in movies because it's uncomfortable. IT's something we mock because it's frightening. I think this is tragic. Friendship has become something that must retain a certain distance and boundary. In some ways, this is perhaps healthy, and a sign of the increasing equality of the genders. A hundred years ago, men's and women's worlds were so seperate that they practically spoke different languages, and it must have been very difficult to communicate across that chasm on some levels. Perhaps in some ways, the romantic friendship was for some people a way of feeling parts of closeness and intimacy that society did not account for between men and women. At the same time, it leads one to wonder - we have to an extent fetishized sexual-romantic love to the point where we presume it is the power more binding than any other - after all, can you imagine a romcom about two people who loved each other deeply but without a hint of sex between them? And I think that in a sense this makes it difficult even within marriages - because the assumption in a marriage is that the romantic aspect of the relationship (in our newer conception of the word romantic) is the penultimate expression of closeness, and I would suggest that this is an illusion that does nto hold up long in many relationships. The friendship aspect of marriage - that one should marry their best friend, and foster that friendship throughout - becomes the sort of adorable side note, the humdrum, uninteresting part of the relationship (again, how many romcoms involve people who don't really like each other falling in love in spite of that?). To some extent one wonders if perhaps it would be easier to marry by choosing someone that they are close friends with, whatever the gender or appearance, and just letting sex follow on from that (I'm a bit biased since I fell in love over letters that had nothing to do with sex...). I don't know. I don't mean to make little of romantic, erotic love. It is what it is. But I think we've forgotten that we can care, deeply and powerfully and madly and beautifully, even foolishly sometimes, or jealously, or desperately, for someone without it being a call of hormones.