The Importance of Platonic Intimacy After Abuse
I live in a culture, probably like you, where love stories and romance are held as the zenith of human connection, casting a shadow over the recondite power of platonic intimacy. Perhaps the most revelatory lesson I’ve learned as I’ve begun moving through the excruciating process of healing after Intimate Partner Violence (IVP) is the restorative nature of secure friendships.
Growing up in the 90s had me daydreaming about fairytale love set to the soundtrack of Mariah Carey’s Dreamlover. I blindly sang, ‘dream lover come rescue me, take me up, take me down, take me anywhere you want to, baby now’, while imagining a relationship that would someday do exactly that—save me from my violent life. That was my model for peek romance.
Nobody I knew was talking about codependency then, or the chaotic nature of neurochemicals in the early stages of dating, and definitely not the impact of making longterm romantic decisions with a yet-to-be fully developed prefrontal cortex. With a long standing history of violent childhood trauma and this very warped sense of love, it’s no wonder I found myself at 20 entering a romantic relationship that would come to define a large portion of my adult life.
But before that relationship, there was another—and it’s this relationship that I’ve seen help me become the competent adult I am today. It’s this relationship that holds me in my darkest, most ruthless pain, and it’s this relationship I turn to first when I want to celebrate. I wasn’t at all prepared to enter my 30s divorced and pushing romance to the side in favor of focusing on falling deeper in platonic love, but here we are.
The first time I saw Morganne could easily function as the meet-cute in a cheesy rom-com about vampy femmes falling in love. Unfortunately, we don’t get those rom-coms yet. This love is far too extraordinary for movie stereotypes and schlocky dialogue anyway.
The year was 2008. I had just returned home after traveling abroad in a very cliche attempt to become more of myself. One might say I was at a crossroad in my life. You see—rom-com material already.
In a late night cafe where I would soon find myself working, I stood at the coffee counter picking up my drink. I was clearly 17 because now coffee after 3pm would ruin an entire week of sleep.
As I turned to walk outside, the sound of milk frothing and lively chatter turned to drawn-out, dreamlike hum, creating a sense of suspended time. The room was suddenly moving in slow motion—and where did that wind machine come from? Walking towards me was a person that would come to expand my experience of relating, and thus change the shape of what was possible in my life.
Fast forward to today—after fifteen years of friendship we’ve found ourselves in a place of platonic partnership that is the longest and most secure intimacy I’ve known in this life.
Without Morganne’s friendship, I suspect my journey of healing post emotional and psychological abuse would look significantly different.
While the fact that we both know a similar flavor of IPV has been helpful in understanding the post abuse experience, whats been the most impactful aspect of our relationship has been our individual willingness to place our decision to relate above our desire to judge. Our friendship is one a that may not always be comfortable given our shared resolution to consensually say and receive difficult-to-hear reflections, but it will be honest, caring, and respectful.
It’s precisely this dynamic that has created a safe haven for my tenderness in the waves of grief, rage, confusion, and pain that have come since my divorce—and equally my joy, relief, hope, and passion. There’s been a deeply paradoxical, full spectrum of emotions that’ve surfaced as I’ve been unraveling and reckoning with my decision to stay in an abusive situation, and confront the reality of being abused.
My friendship with Morganne has been like an oxygen mask in thin air offering me the life sustaining molecules I require to continue hiking up this perpetual mountain of life. Our phone calls spanning 8+ hours have seen me through nights of panic and days of pleasure, through days of uncontrollable grief, and visions of future ease.
With romantic partnership idealized and depicted as the ultimate source of happiness, fulfillment, and companionship, experiencing Intimate Partner Violence can be exceptionally disorienting. This portrayal of romantic relationships as life's grand prize perpetuates the notion that all other bonds pale in comparison, yet it’s often our friendships that out last romantic relationships and create a consistent anchor through the highs and lows of life.
Empirical Evidence
Research has consistently backed—what seems to me an obvious conclusion—that having close friends can contribute to improved mental health, stress reduction, emotional regulation, and a stronger sense of belonging. When the research surrounding the significance of belonging, the value of friendship on overall well-being, and the enormous consequences of IPV are put together, it’s easy to see the importance of platonic intimacy after abuse.
Across the gender spectrum, Intimate Partner Violence is associated with an increased risk of current poor health, depressive symptoms, substance use, developing a chronic disease, chronic mental illness, and injury. Higher psychological IPV scores were more strongly associated with these outcomes when paired with physical IPV scores in logistic regression models (a statistical model that estimates the probability of an event occurring based on a given dataset of independent variables.) Both physical and psychological Intimate Partner Violence are associated with significant physical and mental health consequences for victims.
Meanwhile, due to the activation of the brain regions associated with reward and pleasure, relationships with loved ones have been shown to reduce the perception of physical pain.
Although chronic pain has a biopsychosocial element, little research has been done on its social context. Current evidence shows that interactions with romantic partners shape chronic pain (and vice versa), but research on the intersection of adult friendship and chronic pain is scarce. In a recent small scale study done at Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon, Centre for Social Research and Intervention in Portugal, researchers concluded the relevance of harnessing the power of adult friendships to promote chronic pain adjustments.
What that all shows is that experiencing physical and psychological Intimate Partner Violence creates substantial health issues for targets, while the stability of loving relationships, including friendships, reduces our perception of pain.
Having lived through this, and still navigating the consequences of the experience—which I imagine will be a lifelong pursuit, what comes to mind when I see this data together is the interplay of our biological need to belong and the commonly used tactic of isolation in abusive relationships.
Feeling a sense of belonging is deeply ingrained and scientifically vital for our overall well-being as humans. Baumeister and Leary proposed that the ‘need to belong’ is a fundamental human motivation that drives us to seek interpersonal connections and establish relationships. Neuroscience shows that social isolation and perceived social rejection activate areas of the brain associated with physical pain.
Looking at this fundamental need to belong while considering post-abuse healing makes me think of two connection points: 1. attachment biology’s impact on grief (more on this in my forthcoming workshop, The Grief Garden) and 2. yet another layer of biological impact that psychological & emotional abuse has on victims.
The neurological mechanism of grief surrounding the loss of relationship (be it to death or other situation) functions less like an addiction (craving the person) and more like thirst—a physiological requirement to remain alive. Our attachment biology says, “find your person or you’re going to die.” I can attest to how dramatic the neucleus accumbuns, the region of the brain associated with yearning, can be. It’s no wonder it takes the average person 7 attempts to leave an abusive relationship. We don’t just need to emotionally calibrate to leaving, our biology has to acclimate as well. Each time we leave and return, we learn new coping skills.
The findings of studies on the process of leaving can help support systems understand that the leave/return cycle is an opportunity to learn better coping skills, not a sign of failure—which leads us back to the importance of friendship. Secure friendships provide a safe space where survivors can express themselves without judgment and receive validation for their experiences. In the aftermath of an abusive relationship, platonic intimacy serves as a vital counterbalance to the negative self-perceptions that were cultivated during the abuse.
I’ve lived through a lot of abuse in my life and, of course, these different experiences aren’t something that can be compared. Each season of violence I’ve lived through has brought unique consequences. I can, however, say that no other season has brought me to such deep places of contemplating what I believe to be true about life.
While romantic relationships hold a particular value, seeking a greater sense of balance in the style of relationships we cultivate has the potential to safeguard us from the turbulence of life when healing abuse and beyond.
Considering this, I find myself thinking about bell hooks. In All About Love, she says,
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
Through my friendships, I can see myself building a fortified plasticity that’s allowing me to stand deeper in myself than I ever have before. The security of these relationships are allowing me to gently hold the grief I’ve never had the chance to grieve. As I focus on tending to the wounds of my life, I’m watching the space for love expand within me. Through this platonic intimacy, I know unequivocally that along with rebuilding after abuse, I’m also learning to embody what it means to relate to life, rather than survive or escape it. •
“Significantly, in future feminist movement we will spend less time critiquing patriarchal marriage bonds and more effort showing alternatives, showing the value of peer relationships which are founded on principles of equality, respect, and the belief that mutual satisfaction and growth are needed for partnerships to be fulfilling and lasting.”
Cover Image by Tara Ashton
Sources
1. Coker, Ann & Davis, Keith & Arias, Ileana & Desai, Sujata & Sanderson, Maureen & Brandt, Heather & Smith, Paige. (2002). Physical and Mental Health Effects of Intimate Partner Violence for Men and Women. American journal of preventive medicine. 23. 260-8. 10.1016/j.amepre.2021.10.001.
2. Master, S.L., Eisenberger, N.I., Taylor, S.E., Naliboff, B.D., Shirinyan, D., & Lieberman, M.D. (2009). "A picture's worth: Partner photographs reduce experimentally induced pain." Psychological Science, 20(11), 1316-1318
3. Bernardes, Sónia & Almeida, Inês & Forgeron, Paula. (2023). Friend or Foe? A Thematic Analysis of Adult Friendships and Chronic Pain Adjustment. Pain Management Nursing. 24. 10.1016/j.pmn.2023.03.003.
4. Baumeister, R.F., & Leary, M.R. (1995). "The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation." Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.
5. Cacioppo, J.T., Hawkley, L.C., & Thisted, R.A. (2015). "Perceived social isolation makes me sad: 5-year cross-lagged analyses of loneliness and depressive symptomatology in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study." Psychology and Aging, 30(2), 311-324.
6. O'Connor, Mary-Frances & McConnell, Mairead. (2017). Grief Reactions: A Neurobiological Approach. 10.1007/978-3-319-65241-2_3.
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