A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.C.S. Lewis I’ve had it on my list to write this edition of The Pour for awhile, the idea has been percolating since July. Then I went on vacation for a week and came back and felt August slipping away (is this a Taylor Swift lyric?) and I was stressing about having not yet written this. I was also feeling stressed about not really having anything to share in terms of offerings/things a person ostensibly running a business might put in their newsletter. And then my kind, gentle, inner fairy godmother whispered “You work a 9-5, you’re holding a lot of things, and you’re doing your best. You’re the boss of this and you don’t need to do anything in a way that brings more stress. You get to make it easy and joyful. It’s literally called The Pour because you pour out what you can from a place of fullness.” Hopefully my inner fairy godmother’s message resonates for you in some way, too. Anyway, let’s get into it. I am officiating several weddings in September, so this means that the last month and a bit has been steeped in love stories. In reading the couples’ responses to my questionnaire, I am offered a tiny glimpse inside the world they’ve created together. The way Saturday mornings feel playful and silly. Their coffee rituals. How she makes him laugh by creating voices for their dog. I love the tiny but big things that make up a love story. Yes, sign me the hell up for all the romance. I’m an avid romance reader, I love the tropes and the bittersweet angst. I love the big, bold pageantry of a juicy love story. But what I think I love even more is the layer beneath all of that. The true romantic in me pines for the real grittiness of love. The sticky bits, the challenges you’ve moved through together, the arguments you keep having simply because you’re two completely different humans with different brains that see the world in ways that don’t always align. I love the ways we choose love even when it’s hard, even when grief sits heavy on our chests, even when we don’t feel seen and understood, even when they fail you or you them - because it’s true, we will fail each other. But we also get to repair and continuously find ways to grow, to do things better, to be more aware. All of this love story excavation has got me thinking about some of my life’s greatest love stories: my friendships. We don’t write as many songs about them or fill pages of books with their stories. We don’t say vows to our friends or create milestones to honour friendships. We don’t have the same rules of engagement that we might for romantic relationships; you don’t hear about friendship therapy, and there aren’t as many resources for moving through conflict or practicing boundaries. Friendship breakups can be just as painful, but we don’t pull out the pint of ice cream and sweatpants to grieve them. And yet for many, friendships are the soulmate relationships and chosen family that carry us through the seasons of our lives. Recently a friend of over 15 years told me that she was proud of the compassion that I’m able to show to others, she said that this is an area of growth that she’s noticed me intentionally cultivate over the years. She brought up how there was a time in our early twenties when I used to be more easily irritated, my moods were mercurial. I felt grateful for the honesty, it made me reflect on how and why things have shifted. It also made me aware of the beauty and gift of having long friendships, where we’ve seen and known many versions of one another. Cranky and sad early twenties Jules is grateful that the ‘ride or dies’ have stuck it out to know a more compassionate version of me. You see, all that anger, moodiness, and even resentment that I felt in my early twenties was from the bottled up feelings that I didn’t know how to express. The parts of myself that I didn’t know I could share with them. Ram Dass says: “We can only meet others as deeply as we have met ourselves.” And if I may, I would add that we must be willing to be seen in these depths. One of the (many) differences between that younger version of me and who I am today is that now, I am more willing to be seen and known, to be vulnerable. This allows me to be a better friend because I can open up, share, and let others in while holding better space for them to do the same. I have also learned to hold more compassion for myself which helps me to do the same for my friends. My friendships have gotten richer and more beautiful in my thirties because most of the company I keep is willing to swim in their own deep waters. At a bachelorette weekend for one of my dearests, I created a love story ritual. Sat around a campfire in the woods, we all wrote down our love story with the bride, put them in a box and passed them around the circle. We each read one aloud to her, and she had to guess who wrote it. It struck me that this is something we ought to do more often. What would it look like for us to treat our friendships as the love stories that they are? To define and share these stories, to immortalize them with intentional honouring. To pledge vows to the groupchat and capture the ways our friendships are layered, how we shift and evolve together. When I think of the questions I ask couples, and the worlds that they share, it makes me wonder about the mini worlds that exist in my friendships. One world is a consistent stream of conversation, usually on multiple platforms that range from deep psychoanalysis to Shrek memes, simultaneously. Others consist of podcast length voicenotes, letters written back and forth with lavender clippings from her mum’s garden, video calls with her little one, scheduled phone chats from across the globe, and picking up right where we left off. With another, I live in a world of staying up until 5am talking, even though we know we’ll pay for it the next day. A world of eating butter chicken roti on the couch on a Friday and going deep together. One world is east end dates in a French cafe, others are dinners that stretch out for hours. I have worlds that have existed since we were 12 and some only a few years old, all with their own histories and language. In the languages of these worlds I speak romance novel, I speak homemade Vietnamese food, I speak seasonal vegan, I speak Facebook Marketplace finds. And these worlds hold our shared pain and grief, they know loss; a spouse, miscarriage, a beloved pet, a dream, a relationship, a country we no longer call home. We mourn how we used to look and feel. We mourn the parts of ourselves that we haven’t seen for awhile. We mourn what may never be. And at the same time our worlds hold space for hope; we look ahead to milestones yet to come. In each of these worlds, it is safe for me to be exactly who I am, and they remind me when I forget. No world is perfect, but they are all singularly co-created with something to share, to receive, to learn, to hope for. Society may place higher value on romantic relationships, but that doesn’t need to stop us from celebrating the worlds we create in our friendships. The love stories we share with our dearest friends are core parts of us, and I never want to take this for granted. If I were to make any vows, they’d be to treat my friendships as the love stories that they are. To not shy away from truth and conflict, to show up as I am and commit to being a safe place for them to do the same, and to stay open to being deeply met. Some things to think about: How do you feel about the friendships in your life? What are the little things that make up your friendship worlds? What holds you back from having deeper friendships? What would some of your friendship love stories look like? Also, if you want to share a friendship love story with me, hit reply. I’d love to hear it.
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