On the highway out of Sacramento, sitting shotgun and shivering just slightly, I begin reading an article titled “Beyond BFF” aloud to Lexy. Written by Kayleen Schaefer and published in The New York Times, it explores the personal and social utility for women of having a “person”—another woman held at a place of intimacy beyond best-friendhood, somehow more mature, somehow closer, somehow more. It’s chilly out for late February, colder than it had been the week before I flew in. Lexy laughs and nudges the heat up higher. “Straight women,” she says.

When I read this aloud, I pause, laugh awkwardly, and point out that this clearly wasn’t written for us. My childhood best friend was my first crush. My high school best friend was my worst and longest-lasting crush, all twisted up in the slow-burning and horrible knowledge of what those feelings meant about me. Crushes and puberty, sex, maybe love, maybe marriage—the essay charts it so neatly alongside, but insistently separate from, that friendship. And the question—can the girl “also be” that matured, future thing—assumes this same separation. The intimacies between women, moreover, are relegated to places of retreat. In times of crisis, women escape to their best-friendships for respite and support. But that aspect of escape assumes that the friend is separate from the day-to-day—a temporary shelter rather than a true home.

Then come crushes and puberty, sex, maybe love, and still sometimes marriage. With each milestone, the label can begin to seem like a cute school-age relic. If a best friend is someone whose hair you braided and whom you told about your first kiss, can she also be the woman who keeps the spare keys to your first studio apartment, lets you cry in her arms after a boss threatens to fire you or listens when you tell her, and only her, of a sexual encounter that left you with a bad feeling?

“Beyond BFF” isn’t about sex, it’s about intimacy. It clearly wasn’t written to titillate, as these articles often are. It was written in an attempt to capture how women find something in each other that mutually sustains them. Schaefer is the author of Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship, a book about “the power and glory of female friendships.” In “Beyond BFF,” she writes that childhood best-friendship outgrows itself into some new, adult animal:

If you’re a queer girl, you know what I’m talking about. It spins your head around, makes you see things that aren’t there—or that are, but that you’re not supposed to acknowledge. After it happens to you, it sets a precedent, wrapping caution tape around every encounter with another woman. With Lexy, when we were getting to know each other, I read every romantic overture as platonic friendliness. I tiptoed around her, a little too used to crime scenes.

There’s a way in which women’s homosociality—think ‘homoeroticism’ without the eroticism—gets uplifted as a peak: the peak of progressive feminism, the peak of healthy relationships, the peak of platonic intimacy. It has a charge in our collective imagination, too—producing a kind of frisson from being almost unacceptable, almost over the line. The internet is rife with articles on platonic dates , platonic nudes , and platonic flings between women. These are regularly passed around my circle of queer women with equal parts disbelief, resignation, and humor. What the articles describe is both unfamiliar and too familiar to us—a toothless version of the way that straight women behave sometimes towards queer women. How they flirt to see if they can, to see what it feels like, without stakes or repercussions—for them, at least.

We wind closer to Santa Cruz. I’ve never seen hills that unfold like this, like the earth shrugged and settled upon its haunches, idle, content to be as it is. It’s my first time in California since I was a kid; my second time seeing her after we confessed our feelings; my third time with her since we met on holiday the summer before. After a while, I reach across the console and take her hand.

We are in a cultural moment starving for intimacy. We want to know what it looks like, what it means. We want to know how to be in it, with it, with another person. Think pieces wonder about the alienation caused by dating and hook-up apps like Tinder; more and more powerful and not-so-powerful men get named as abusers. The internet wonders if Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are fucking, and people get paid to write about it . The two are heralded for their connection, their chemistry, their charge, their romance. They are functionally co-workers.

On my first day in Sacramento, we watch the Olympics with her brother—specifically, ice dancing pair Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. I’ve been a fan since the 2010 Olympics in my hometown of Vancouver. The past week since the team event has heralded a rush of articles taking up the apparent intimacy between them . Effectively, they ask: Are they dating? Are they in a relationship? What are they to each other? Who are they to us?

I meant this like I would marry a really good cup of coffee, or a chair with better back support than the one I was in, or any other abstractly non-anthropomorphic object that made my life easier. I meant it with the desperate hyperbole of a beleaguered sitcom character, but the laugh track never came. Instead, I was met with a deafening silence in our corner of the office, and I turned around to stares. I went hot and red and thought, O__h God, oh fuck, they think—

I say “if,” but don’t quite need to. It hits me a few days later. The previous winter, I was working an administrative job in an office. One day, approaching the end of the week and finishing off a large snarl of data entry errors, closing out of my email correspondence with the system specialist, I remarked unthinkingly, “I swear to God, Patricia saves my life every single day—I would marry her in a heartbeat.”

Women calling each other “work wives” seems, on the surface, to be about making a mockery out of that relationship, reclaiming themselves and their place in the office, proclaiming the power of women working together. But does it? For who? For which women?

This stays with me after I read the article. It runs laps in my mind. The idea of calling someone your “work wife;" of that being the office in-joke, a professional and personal shorthand for productive closeness. A public performance of intimacy. I’m a visibly queer woman. If I started to call a coworker my “work wife,” at best, I’d be fielding some questions. At worst, I’d be opening myself up for harassment—or maybe even facing an accusation of harassment myself.

Meanwhile, co-workers Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur, who co-founded online commerce site Of A Kind, are publishing a book together in 2019: Work Wife . They are described in “Beyond BFF” in terms of their devotion to one another. Schaefer quotes Cerulo: “We’re friends who started a company and spend an inordinate amount of time together, and the nature of our relationship is really hard to put into words quickly. Referring to each other as ‘work wife’ gets at the blend of the professional and the personal—and the commitment.”

Cerulo and Mazur call each other “work wives” and sell a book about it. Virtue and Moir call each other “business partners” and spin into an embrace on the ice. For them, it seems easy. With straightness securely in place, anything is plausible, anything can make sense and seem true. Rather than contorting around tape, they’re fluid—their narratives unfold effortlessly, smoothing over definitions, contradictions, and cracks in the telling.

The term “work wife” rolls off the tongue. There’s a sly wink-and-nudge to it, like you’re stealing something back from the boys. Men have work wives for two reasons, as I understand it: as a replacement for some closeness they aren’t able to create at home, and/or as an excuse to share, shift, or delegate labor while still getting some amount of credit for it. Women calling each other “work wives” seems, on the surface, to be about making a mockery out of that relationship, reclaiming themselves and their place in the office, proclaiming the power of women working together. But does it? For who? For which women?

“Did you say you would marry her?” one of my coworkers asked. I went redder, and stumblingly explained that I was kidding and I’d never even met her; I thought hysterically about H.R., and the cost of school, and that time I had to report a male colleague who commented while I was filing about how they’d “already got me on my knees.” Nothing had ever come of that, that I knew of, so maybe nothing would happen here, either?

It takes me a month to say “my girlfriend” to anyone, even Lexy, even though we’ve been functionally and emotionally involved for many months already. Her father accidentally calls me her “friend” the first time I meet him, fresh off the plane near midnight, sitting in the living room of her family home. We watch the Olympics in that living room the next day, and when my favorite team wins gold, she’s so relieved that she covers me in kisses.

This is not just about “Beyond BFF.” In 2015, Broadly published a piece by Monica Heisey titled “The Five Stages of Every Friendship Fling;” in 2016, The New York Times published one by Rebecca Traister titled “What Women Find in Friends That They May Not Get From Love.” In 2015, Kim Brooks wrote “ I’m Having a Friendship Affair ” for The Cut_._ Maria Yagodo wrote “ The Satisfying Joy of Sending Platonic Nudes to Your Friends ” for Broadly near the end of 2017. These authors describe how they found fulfillment in other women, but the spectral figure of The Boyfriend or The Husband lurks at the margins of each piece. While he may be decentered, heterosexuality is not: it is, in fact, what is at stake.

Sometimes these closer-than-words, hard-to-explain friendships between women can only be described as “emotional affairs.” The joke among my friends about these kinds of articles has always been, “If it walks like a dyke and it talks like a dyke…,” followed by the question: “Do they even realize?” It’s a joke, but I think there’s a grain of truth in the question. Not in the sense of, “Do they realize this is kind of queer,” because the coy way these things are written about, like each word bears an unvoiced huff of laughter, suggests a hyperawareness about the implied gayness of it all. They do realize, and that’s what gives it that sweet thrill of nearness: near forbidden, nearly true, like the tickle of electricity between your skin and someone else’s when you’re a breath away from touching. The more salient question is whether straight women realize that this near-queerness is a function of the rigidity and insufficiency of straightness. Do they ever ask themselves, W__hat am I not getting from my boyfriend/partner/husband that I’m, instead, seeking out in this woman?

Brooks’ piece is subtitled: “A look at the intensely obsessive, deeply meaningful, occasionally undermining, marriage-threatening, slightly pathological platonic intimacy that can happen between women .” She acknowledges that her unhappiness and loneliness were factors in the events described, and she even briefly considers and then dismisses the possibility that this friendship had developed a sexual or romantic component. But the piece revolves around heterosexuality. From her childhood best friend with whom she planned how their lives “might change when [they] found boyfriends, went to college, got married, had kids,” to this newfound, pathological, marriage-threatening affair, her intimacy with other girls and women is framed around men.

The idea that this is what it means to become platonically close with another woman conveniently explains away potential slips into romance.

There are a lot of these takes on the internet. In them, it’s always assumed that both women are getting out of the relationship what they want. And perhaps they are, if for both of them that’s the ability to uphold their straight relationship by, ironically, getting from a woman what their man doesn’t provide them—without ever having to question whether they owe that other woman a conversation about what they each want and need to get out of it, thereby undercutting the easy assumptions proffered by heteronormativity. But I haven’t seen any exploring the other possibility: that the friend who gets drawn into the execution of another woman’s heterosexual unhappiness and homosocial desire actually wants more, whether in terms of intimacy or simply acknowledgement. We’ve heard a lot about what it is to be a woman who is unsatisfied in herself and her relationships and turns to another woman for those needs; we haven’t heard the stories of the Other Women. Those stories might reframe these affairs away from the question of loneliness, unhappiness, malaise, and need, and towards a question of labor, consumption, and use. It might help us recognize how when straightness is the assumed default, gestures of queer intimacy get muddled, blurred, and erased amidst all that platonic friendships have been stretched to encompass.