The Lowest Form of Love: Aristotle, Me, and My Best Friend’s Girl

I was recently at a party where I spent some time paraphrasing Aristotle via Drew Pinsky on Celebrity Rehab, who told his patients that friendship is the highest form of love. It’s an attractive claim to me as a single, self-employed 33-year-old with an unresolved habit of making a meal from a bag of potato chips. Without friendship, my life would be a much scarier than it already it is. I sometimes imagine that without close and loving friends I’d long ago have given up the ghost for an accountant’s cubicle and Tivo.

If you sense some self-congratulatory bullshit in the above sentiment, I agree. At this same party where I passed along the abridged wisdom of Plato’s star pupil, I later found myself–or put myself, to be honest about it–in an unfriendly posture towards P, one of my oldest and closest friends. He’d been seeing a woman for a month or so and invited her as his date to the party. I’d met her a few weeks earlier when I had drinks with the two of them at pink and plastic tchotchke bar in my neighborhood.

I liked her from the start, though before I walked through the door I put myself on a strong leash that made me feel a strained impropriety about even looking at her during conversation. I knew that I was attracted to her, but the constraints I’d put on myself made it possible to not dwell on them. Even so, when P said he was going home but that she and I shouldn’t let it stop our night, I felt my ears stiffen. It was like someone had brought a tennis ball into the room, but I didn’t yet know where it was.

When we all met again two weeks later, I carried with me that sense of attention to something I couldn’t see but which made my inner self stand alert. But I remained indifferent by self-imposition.

Then I let the leash drop for a few minutes at the party. Sometime after midnight I was in a new permutation of an ever-evolving conversational pod of people and noticed she had joined the group, and was in fact standing beside me. I was drunk and telling dirty stories, enjoying the pseudo-disbelief that my adolescent sex jokes provoked, like a neo-hipster variation on the drawing room pshaw. P was on the other side of the party talking to another cluster of people (including, I think, an especially drunk woman with a hat made from an otter pelt, sparkling sequins placed in its eyeholes).

With her standing beside me, I felt something spring up inside me and I noticed there wasn’t anything holding back on the leash tow which I’d been deferring to. So I put my arm around her shoulder.

It felt instantly good and right, like the momentary glee a dog might feel starting a full sprint across an open lawn, its leash bouncing haphazardly behind. I felt her nudge her body closer to mine a few millimeters and she slid her arm around my waist. I kept talking, wanting to not look at her or acknowledge what was happening. It was a casual gesture I’ve done dozens of times before, an affectionate arm around the wife or girlfriend of a close friend. The only difference was I’d never seriously wanted to have sex with a close friend’s wife or girlfriend. Human intuition is, apparently, strong enough to read dramatically different intentions into identical-seeming postures of embrace. So while I stood there arm-in-arm, and torso-to-torso with one of my closest friends’ date, I forced myself to ignore what became obvious to everyone else.

A few minutes later I felt my phone buzz in my pocket and saw a text message from my friend M, who was sipping champagne with her date on the other side of the party. “Don’t,” she’d written. Another mutual friend came up and spent a few minutes trying to affably talk me out of doing something that, I insisted, I wasn’t doing in the first place. All the while, I felt her small, warm body nested against mine, the friction of her vintage dress’s nylon fabric sliding against her skin beneath.

Finally P came up to us. We made joking party talk, but I saw a look on his face I hadn’t seen in the sixteen years we’d known each other. His eyes were sharp and watchful, his mouth drew a straight line against his pale face. The smiles at the end of his one-liners were reluctant and dropped away quickly after they formed. I let my arm drop, and she did too.

I’ve never cheated on anyone I’ve dated, but I have to stop and think to add up how many women in relationships I’ve helped cheat on their partners. I can think of at least six, and more that would probably come up if I pushed deeper into my memory in search of random one-night hook-ups at bars with people I’ve long since chosen to forget about.

If friendship is the highest form of love, I wonder, what is the lowest?

In all its forms, love deserves respect. But in practice, it’s easy to experience the phenomenon of love and draw from it wildly conflicting ideals. Wounds come not from the experience of the phenomenon, but in trying to contain it in the immutable confines of a maxim or belief; a right, or a wrong.

I’ve since said I was sorry, and I feel badly about things. But I don’t feel sorry. I just feel like a dog coming home from a walk cut unexpectedly short, the loosed adrenaline uselessly coursing through its veins, stuck in a rhetorical living room where running free is impossible. When I look around I feel like a dog surrounded by humans, people who govern themselves on a logic that evaporates into incongruent sound waves in my brain.

I know there is something right about this, and its rightness cuts across every instinct I have inside, like some romantic and terrifying phantom I might look for in the shadows of my bedroom some nights, waking up alone to the white buzz of the air conditioner, the distant clatter of street traffic, and the babble of the people come out to smoke on the sidewalk from the bar below. Sometimes I can pick out a line of their conversation, a rational but incomplete statement that hangs for a minute above the otherwise indecipherable voices.

Photo by The Library of Congress