Soulmates
Long-term friendship and why it matters
My soulmates have never taken the form of romantic partners - I’ve never stayed with anyone long enough for them to warrant the title - they have instead always manifested as my female friends. There are many benefits to this. Firstly it means there isn’t just one (not that I believe in ‘the one’ in the romantic sense either) and secondly it means that sex doesn’t get in the way and f**k things up.
In my experience, friends have also proved way more reliable than family, and none more so than this woman. Sophi, who has been in my life for over 40 years.
(Sophi and I in London on Monday)
Sophi and I met at secondary school when were around 14 years old. On paper we should never have been friends, our lives, families and upbringings being the polar opposite of each other. Sophi’s life was everything mine wasn’t.
Raised in Australia and England by what she described as ‘hippy parents’ Sophi had even lived in a commune for a while, and one of the first things I found out about her was that she had three dads (her ‘real’ dad and two stepfathers) all of whom she called by their first names and all of whom were friends. This was astonishing to me.
She also had more stepbrothers and sisters than I could wrap my head around and an unofficial extended family consisting of friends of her mum and current stepdad and their associated offspring too. They all got together on Christmas Day, Sophi told me, which meant making dinner for 20-odd people each year. It seemed to me that there was noise and laughter and comfort and community everywhere you turned in Sophi’s life.
I was from a working-class northern family, had never been on a plane (I didn’t even have a passport), let alone to Australia and was still attending Salvation Army church services every Sunday with my committed Christian parents and severely disabled sister. Our house was silent and sparse, filled only with rules.
The first time I went to Sophi’s home I was shyer than I can ever remember being. It was like visiting a completely different country, with its own language and customs. The house was old, huge and rambling - the kind you might set a period drama in - except it had a distinctly shabby-chic vibe to it, with a library called ‘the red room’ entirely full of books. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
The evening meal that I called ‘tea’ they called ‘supper’ and it was around their huge wooden table that I ate pasta and vegetarian dishes involving lentils for the first time. I had only experienced ‘meat and two veg’ up until that point. I can remember Sophi’s little brother watching me and pointing out that I didn’t hold my fork like the rest of them did. The strangest and most fascinating aspect of my new friend’s life to me though, was the fact that these people all hugged and said they loved each other with some frequency. Hugging wasn’t a thing in my family, love even less so.
Our friendship shouldn’t have worked but somehow it did and Sophi and I fell in love with each other with the intensity that only teenage girls can. We became inseparable.
