The platonic partnerships that unite pairs ’till death do us part’

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Do all relationships between life partners need to be romantic and sexual? People who opt for platonic life partnerships respond with a resounding “no.”

Deena Lilygren, who is a mother in her 40s, has lived for years with her best friend Maggie Brown in Kentucky, United States.

During this period when the two live together, Brown met her husband. He moved into the house where his two friends live, proposed to Brown, they got married, and eventually the three bought a house together.

When he moved in with them – and again, when she was asked to marry him – Brown told him that the two friends were a “package”. According to Lilygren, “she wanted to make sure he didn’t have the same expectation that a lot of people seem to have – that marriage is the time when you leave your friends.”

Brown and Lilygren have a relationship that goes beyond most friendships. Lilygren considers them to be “platonic life partners”, meaning they are each other’s main life partners – the same kind of relationship that people normally associate with spouses or love partners, except for the absence of sex or romance in the relationship. your relationship.

The phrase “platonic life partners”, little known in the past, has been popularized in recent times by two Singaporean women in their 20s, April Lee and Renee Wong. They discuss their platonic life partnership (PVP) on TikTok, where Lee has over 51k followers.

Lee and Wong forged their friendship as PVPs when Wong moved from Singapore to Los Angeles, US, to live with Lee in September 2021. As Lee described in an article about their partnership for Refinery29, they weren’t just best friends, but “financial support partners” who helped each other to achieve their life goals more effectively and wanted to be together not just living together temporarily, but for the long term.

The popularity of her story generated several reports about this type of compromised friendship, including between men. But relationships like these aren’t entirely new. In some cases, their roots date back to the 18th century. While some were certainly gay relationships in disguise, it’s quite possible that many were exactly like Lee and Wong’s — it just didn’t even have the term “PVP” to describe them.

For some people currently in PVP relationships, like Lilygren, this term is an important way not only to define their life situation, but also to stress the importance of non-romantic partnerships.

“Culturally, we actually devalue friendship compared to relationships like marriage. People expect us to have secondary, transitory friendships that are marginalized when one of their friends marries,” says Lilygren, “and there’s really not a word for [descrever] a friend who is a life partner.”

The term “PVP” fills this gap.

The ‘Boston Weddings’

From colonial times until about 1850, people entered into life partnerships — marriages — for “pragmatic” reasons, according to Eli Finkel, a professor at Northwest University in Illinois and author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage. : How the Best Marriages Work.

For Finkel, “the distinct functions of marriage at that time revolved around basic survival—literally, things like food, clothing, and shelter.” For women (who were kept out of the workforce and could not support themselves independently), having a husband was critical to survival.

But that changed for many people in places like the UK and US in the late 1800s. In these countries, middle-class women could already go to school, paving the way for them to start working, according to LGBTQIA+ historian north. -American Lillian Faderman. As a result, women no longer needed to depend on their husbands for income and some decided to live with other women.

At this time, the expression “Boston marriage” emerged to describe “two women living together in a long-term committed relationship,” according to Faderman. She says that no one knows for sure where this expression came from, but it is suspected that it may have originated in the novel The Bostonians, by Henry James, published in 1866, which presented a possible romantic relationship between two women.

“Whether they were lesbian relationships or how many of those relationships were lesbians … we’ll never know,” she says, “because that sort of thing wasn’t stated on paper – people didn’t talk openly about sex between women.”

What was stated on the paper were the thoughts of Eleanor Butler, one of the so-called Ladies of Llangollen, two wealthy women whose financial resources allowed them to move away from their families in Ireland to live together in Wales in the late 1700s. relationship was often called “romantic friendship”.

Butler referred to his life partner Sarah Ponsonby as his “sweetheart” and detailed their days together in his diary, but never mentioned sex.

While it is impossible to know the true nature of these historical relationships, historians suggest that these “romantic friendships” were quite common at the time, so it is quite possible that some of them were not sexual, serving as the precursors to today’s PVPs.

‘It seems inseparable’

Eli Finkel claims that between the mid-1800s and the 1960s, marriage moved out of the “pragmatic age” and into the “love-based age,” when people began to form life partnerships for love and intimacy, not for survival.

Industrialization brought young people to the cities, making them, “for the first time … geographically and economically independent of their families,” according to Finkel. And with that freedom came the emphasis on “emotional fulfillment” in choosing life partners.

Finkel says that in the 1960s, there was a further shift in people’s needs for life partners in the Western world. “Love and intimacy remained necessary, but they were no longer sufficient,” he says. Today’s marriages also need to “allow people to be authentic and pursue their personal growth.”

Marriages and lifetime partnerships have evolved to a point where many expect their partners to be everything to them, playing a variety of roles that include sexual partnership, cohabitation, parenting partnership, providing emotional support, and financial partnership, among others. functions. It can be asking too much of one person, and “a lot of relationships are feeling the pressure,” according to Finkel.

PVPs, on the other hand, offer an alternative to long-term relationships. A platonic partner is not expected to meet romantic and sexual needs, and people who have a PVP do not consider their romantic partners to be their primary emotional support system.

Some people merge their finances with their PVP, as is normally expected of married couples, but others do not, or merge only partially. Lilygren says they don’t have joint accounts with Brown, “but we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve bought so many things together for the house, including furniture, that it all seems inseparable.”

Generally speaking, starting a PVP relationship has a lot in common with a marriage. Some even marry, in part for the legal rights that come with the union (such as ensuring that their partners are considered their next of kin) or to demonstrate their commitment to family and friends they may not be able to understand otherwise.

Practical discussions about how to share one’s life still apply, as well as additional negotiations about how to incorporate each other’s love partners into relationship and/or life arrangements. People unfamiliar with PVP relationships often struggle with the idea. that two people can share so much intimacy and not have sex.

It took Americans Jay Guercio and Krystle Purificato – who talked about their PVP relationship on the reality show The Cut – to go viral on TikTok for their family and friends to finally understand that they are totally platonic despite their marriage.

And for Lilygren, writing about her relationship with Brown for the US website HuffPost ended up helping to explain the trio’s plight to Brown and her husband’s family. “They’ve started to take us more seriously as a family unit, which is beautiful,” says Lilygren.

But the article also received criticism. “There were a lot of negative comments online because people can’t imagine that our situation is not sexual, which is too bad,” she said.

Currently, while the stigma against people who identify as LGBTQIA+ has not been eradicated and some gay couples still do not come out or identify in this way, people who live with platonic partners are less likely to do so to hide their romance.

The increased acceptance of orientations other than heterosexual orientations has made it easier for many people to maintain openly homosexual relationships. And as more young people speak out publicly about their options for PVP relationships, they are touting that there is more of a lifetime partnership option.

Lilygren openly wrote about dating women in her Huffpost article and her PVP is married to a man. They plan to keep their long-term platonic commitment.

“I certainly don’t see myself ever living away from Maggie,” says Lilygren. “I’ve been seeing someone for two years now and I’m committed to our relationship, but my way of life makes me happy and I don’t want anything to harm it.”

Read the entirety of this report (in English) on the BBC Worklife website.

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