When Tillotson and West met as 18-year-olds, they didn’t set out to transgress relationship norms. They were on a mission to conform, aye ma’am-ing their way through Marine Corps boot camp in South Carolina, and referring to each other by their name that is last preceded the title “Recruit.” Most evenings, Recruit Tillotson and Recruit West spent their hour of free time chatting in front of their shared bunk bed.
During these conversations, they discovered that West’s mom had just moved to a city that was a 20-minute ride away from Tillotson’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. West and Tillotson spent boot camp’s break that is month-long, winding through the Tulsa suburbs in West’s mother’s black sedan, late-aughts rap pulsing through the rolled-down windows. For most of the next four years, they were stationed thousands of miles apart, including when Tillotson eventually deployed to Iraq. From afar, they coached each other through injuries, work woes, and relationship problems. Their friendship really blossomed once they both ended up in the Tulsa area for college, and they started to spend nearly every day together. By then, Tillotson was waiting for her divorce paperwork to be notarized, and West was a mother that is single for her 3-year-old, Kody.
When West got a job at a bar, Tillotson watched Kody during the day so her friend could sleep. Tillotson frequently joined West at preschool pickup. When the two women would walk down the hallway, past the miniature lockers, West said, “it was like the seas parted.” Tillotson could feel the parents’ eyes on her. Periodically, a teacher would sidle up to the two women, direct her gaze toward Tillotson, and ask, “Who is this?” “People would always ask us how we know each other, or, ‘Are you sisters?’ A lot of times people think we’re dating,” Tillotson, 31, said. It would take too long for West and Tillotson to explain the complexity and depth of their friendship to every curious questioner.
Kirn Vintage Stock / Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic
With no lexicon to default to, people with friendships like West and Tillotson’s have assembled a collage of relationship language. They use terms such as best soul friend, platonic life partner, my person, ride or die, queerplatonic partner, Big Friendship. For some, these names serve a purpose that is similar matching friendship necklaces—they’re tokens mainly meant for the two people within the friendship. Others, such as West and Tillotson, search for language that can make their relationship lucid to outsiders. West and Tillotson realized that people understand boot camp to be an intense setting, the kind of environment that could breed an friendship that is equally intense. When the close friends began to refer to each other as “boot-camp besties,” people’s confusion finally faded.
For more than a decade, Nicole Sonderman didn’t mind if the only people who understood Rachel Hebner to her friendship were the two women who were part of it. Sonderman sums up their relationship as “having a life partner, and you just don’t want to kiss them.”
In the years when they both lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, the friends were fluent in the language of each other’s moods and physical changes. Before Hebner suspected into the bathroom, and sat in the adjacent stall as Hebner took it that she might be pregnant, Sonderman made her buy a pregnancy test, steered her. Four years later, the roles reversed: Hebner had the same premonition that is accurate Sonderman. “We paid more attention to each other ourselves,” Sonderman, 37, told me read here than we did to.
They occasionally navigated around other people’s confusion about or combativeness toward their friendship. Their preferred term of endearment for each other, wife, wasn’t a problem for Sonderman’s then-husband. But once Hebner divorced her husband and started dating, her partners that are romantic jealous, especially the women she dated. Sonderman grudgingly placated them by calling Hebner “wiffles” instead of wife.
The pair spent a few years several time zones apart, as Sonderman and her then-husband moved around for his work after those years in Alaska. Eventually Sonderman moved back to Alaska, but Hebner had relocated to Indiana. Phone calls and visits that are occasional their friendship’s support beams. Sonderman said that Hebner reached out less and less because she had no one else to take care of her daughter while she worked as she grappled with a cascade of difficulties: She was in an abusive romantic relationship and she lost her job. She was depressed. In 2021, Hebner died by suicide october.
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