Shon Faye on modern love and the sustaining power of queer friendships
It’s no secret that we’re all obsessed with love. It’s the topic that fascinates, excites, devastates, and eludes us more than any other. It’s forever been at the heart of culture; it’s long dominated our IRL interactions; and, these days, it’s even at the centre of many of our (often tiresome) social media debates. And, although people prefer to circumvent this fact, love is also highly politicised. It’s sewn into the fabric of our society — in the organisation of our private lives; in the marginalisation of those who love ‘outside the norm’; and in the economic policies that tangibly affect our lives.
Lovelessness, then, permeates these spaces too. No doubt we’ve all, at one time or another, proclaimed ourselves to be ‘unloveable’ — whether after a break-up, a string of bad dates, or the breakdown of a family or friendship bond. But for many, these feelings of lovelessness stretch beyond the superficial. In fact, feeling excluded from love is, as journalist and author Shon Faye writes in her new book, Love in Exile, “symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture”. Who gets to feel loved and how they are loved, she argues, is inextricably intertwined with the ways in which “social institutions, cultural representations, and state laws uplift, protect, and validate certain forms of love and desire” — those being: heterosexuality, monogamy, cohabitation, and nuclear families — and “ignore or even denigrate as aberrant [those] who exist outside” of these parameters.
Faye, a London-based writer and the author of 2021’s The Transgender Issue, knows a thing or two about this feeling. As a trans woman who grew up visibly queer in the UK — where the heteronormative family is upheld above all else, and which is increasingly hostile to trans people — she’s no stranger to feeling exiled, and, she writes, is “still in a long process of unlearning” the degrading false narratives of lovelessness and undesirability she’s internalised.
It’s this that drew her to write about love in the first place. “I [started writing] about it because I thought I was bad at it,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “I thought my love life was a complete disaster in a way that no other area of my life was, which is kind of true in terms of short-lived relationships and some poor choices, and I had a fear of being unlovable. I wanted to explore to what extent this fear wasn’t just specific to me.”
“But also,” she adds, “it’s cool for a straight trans woman to write about love. Our love lives are so invisible, and yet they’re a place where a lot of trauma and transphobia [happens]. Someone like me never gets to be the subject of a big memoir about love — so I wrote a book that I wished existed already.”
In Love in Exile, Faye gets candid about her experiences of dating, heartbreak, and addiction, and reflects on how the scripts society writes for us — whether on motherhood, gender roles, or sexiness — influence our feelings of unworthiness and ‘failure’. But she also acknowledges that love isn’t just about romance — in fact, as she ultimately realises, the greatest loves of her life have been her friendships.
“I took the idea that I couldn’t find, or haven’t yet found, a specific form of romantic love as evidence that I’m defective in some way, which reinforces this negative false belief that my life is loveless and I’m unloved,” she tells Cosmopolitan UK. “But actually, the realisation of the book is that not only am I loved, but I have been loved this whole time — [by my friends, myself, and through my spirituality]. What I was bad at [was not love], but at receiving the love that was already around me.”
Below, we publish an extract from Love in Exile, in which Faye reflects on the radical power of friendship, and the particular significance of queer platonic love.
Friendship is a form of love that’s unique because it’s chosen freely — it lacks the unconscious erotic impulses of romance or the duty and tribalism of family. Whereas family often imposes conformity, and romantic love needs deep compatibility for long term survival, friendship can more comfortably survive in the affirmation of each other’s differences.
In recent years, my friendships feel more authentic to my own history than my dating life. While I function as a de facto heterosexual romantically, in my friendships my sensibilities are queerer. I feel there are strong grounds for making the argument that friendship has a special meaning for queer people like me living in large cities to which we have migrated as adults, because of the ways we are often exiled from the suburban environments in which many of us grew up.
To this day, friendships with other queer people are special to me, because they continue to act as an invitation towards greater self-possession. Of course, straight people also discover themselves in and through friendships. Yet I would argue that, for most cis heterosexuals, with their experience so normalised by mass culture and with less of a cause to fear community and family rejection, friendship does not always have the same imperative. Certainly, there’s less of an automatic affinity. I will often share with a trans woman of recent acquaintance intimate details of my life that I may not have shared with a cis friend of 10 years or more. Of course, I don’t become friends with (or even like) every trans woman I meet, but the drive to mutual recognition, the urge to spill my guts to her as a fellow traveller, someone who will understand, can make it easier to find that connection of friendship.
How then to articulate that particular quality that inheres in queer friendship? Boundaries do exist in queer friendship that separate it from romance, but, in my experience, they are drawn differently from straight friendships. It’s the different forms of intimacy and tenderness that queer friendship can adopt that, as Foucault argued, can make society uneasy and homophobic — perhaps even more so than gay sex. This belittling of friendship manifests politically and economically: there is no tax break, no special inheritance rule, no bereavement leave and no visa for friendship; a friend cannot be your next of kin. Friendlove is a mode of loving ignored by the state and by employers.
Yet I’ve never felt truly seen for who I actually am in a romantic relationship to the same degree as I have in my closest friendships. As I reach my late 30s, the chasm between how men I become involved with romantically behold me, and how I am truly seen in my intimate friendships, remains wider than ever. I compare past lovers to my friends, and the lovers are found wanting. I can’t be sad about this. I am someone for whom philia, friendlove, may indeed form the substance of the greatest love stories of my life.
This extract has been edited and condensed. Love in Exile by Shon Faye is published by Allen Lane and is out now.
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