When my partner and I started seeing a new couples therapist, she asked about our relationship style regarding non/monogamy. As an aside — it’s so wonderful to have a couple’s therapist who doesn’t assume all healthy couples are monogamous!

When my partner told her that they identify as polyamorous and have one other partner, she asked me if I, too, have or want other partners. What should be a relatively straightforward yes/no revealed something that I hadn’t thought of before being asked: I told her that while I consider myself to be romantically monogamous (certainly I’m not sexually monogamous, but I don’t have any interest in sex outside of work and my primary relationship), I do have another platonic life partner, and her name is Nancy.

Nancy and I met when our sons, who are currently 19, were in elementary school basketball together. Since we are both fairly introverted, we allowed our spouses to do most of the socializing with other sports parents, but somehow, we found each other.

The first time we got together off the basketball court felt like a date. We met for pizza downtown and talked for a few hours, cutting straight to the most meaningful stuff. While I don’t remember much of what was said, I do remember discussing the guilt we felt for not being able to exclusively breastfeed our kids when they were little, and the pressures put on mothers to be perfectly sacrificing. We talked about how we’ve tried to hold onto our own identities as women — a resistance against being swallowed up by motherhood. Right away there was a raw honesty between us that felt safe.

Over the time we’ve been friends I’ve gotten divorced, fallen in love again, and gotten remarried. I’ve had another son, and my partner and I asked her and her spouse to be his Godparents. We have seen each other through relationship ups and downs, our own and our family members’ mental health crises, major life events, and the emerging adulthood of the kids who were little when we met.

Nancy and my other very close friend Ashley sat in the hospital with me for 10 hours when my partner had a very invasive and dangerous cancer-related surgery, and Nancy showed up day after day in the hospital when their recovery from that surgery was touch and go. We sat in the hospital room in silence when there was nothing we could say that would make any of us less scared.

We travel together, doing things our partners aren’t interested in: spa trips and bougie dinners. We also just sit on my couch on weekend evenings, getting wine drunk and talking for 5 or 6 hours instead of watching the movie we set out to watch. We share a desire for some form of religiosity in our lives and go to church together from time to time, trying to fill that hole.

Nancy is the only person, besides my partner, who has shared a bed with my little son and I while traveling, and she put up with him laying at our feet and kicking both of us all night. When she got up before me in the morning, I felt her rearrange the blankets for my son and I before slipping out the door, an act of care that touched me.

A gift to writer Jessie Sage from Nancy Credit: Photo: By Jessie Sage

Sometimes I don’t hear from Nancy for a couple of months and I never think anything of it. While I tend to be anxiously attached in my romantic relationships, my attachment to Nancy is secure. I always know that if we fall out of touch for a few months it’s not a reflection of the relationship. As soon as we connect again, we pick up where we left off.

While we have never had a romantic or sexual relationship, it is perhaps one of the most intimate relationships I’ve had. Sometimes when I text her I start with, “Can I tell you something that I am not supposed to say/feel?” and the answer is always yes. We allow each other to be who we are without judgment or expectation.

Recently, when I was asking my partner what they get out of being in another romantic relationship, they said, “Imagine the sexual variety you get from clients, plus the intimacy you get with Nancy, but in one person. That’s what my other relationship is.” That was really the only explanation I needed because I cannot imagine a life that didn’t include those things.

When I said I don’t have another partner, but I have Nancy, our therapist knew exactly what I meant and why it mattered. She revealed that she, too, has a Nancy in her life and that they were internationally traveling soon, while their spouses stayed at home.

Recently, I interviewed North Carolina-based escort Gem DeMilo for my podcast and she talked about choosing to be a single woman. She described mourning the idea of not having love in her life when she took herself out of the dating market, imagining that life outside of romantic relationships would be loveless.

The longer she was single, though, and the more time she spent investing in her friendships, she realized that the way she was thinking about love — indeed the way that we are all enculturated to think about love — was too narrow. “I realized I do have love in my life,” she says. “It’s just that for a long time, because it wasn’t meeting this specific definition, [I thought] it didn’t count. As soon as I stopped having this tunnel vision that it had to look a specific way, I realized that I have an abundance of love in my life.”

Friendship, for Gem, has filled her life with love and meaning in a way that she previously thought only a romantic relationship could. My friendship with Nancy, and a very small number of other people, has similarly enriched my life despite the fact that I am not single.

Our mono-normative culture not only prioritizes sexual monogamy, but it also places romantic relationships at the center of our lives, elevating them above all other types of relationships. While I’m a romantic who cares a great deal about my love life and my partner, the pressure to do so at the expense of all other types of relationships cuts us off from other types of intimacy that can be just as important and meaningful.

My partner has a wife and a girlfriend. I have a spouse and a best friend and those two things are more similar than they are different. It makes sense to take friends just as seriously as we take lovers, especially ones that feel like soul mates.

Jessie Sage is a Pittsburgh-based sex worker, writer, and the host of the podcast When We’re Not Hustling: Sex Workers Talking About Everything But.