On girl soulmates
My recent comedy obsession is also my favourite lesbian non-lesbian couple
I find Izzy and Recipe’s tiktok account when I'm scrolling in bed. Your tiktok handle is @panoramixkrue. You’re two girls living in a north american suburban place i can’t identify. I consume your tiktoks with a voracious hunger. I am obsessed with watching your half baked skits and your vlogs of your days, every single one of which you seem to spend together. It might be that we are having what is called a parasocial relationship. It might be the fact you’re each gifted with genius comedic timing and a repertoire of stupid concepts that you generate from one another with the energy of nuclear fission. The first thing I appreciate about your videos is how charismatically awkward you are: when you talk over each other, halt, talk over each other again, it’s just as artful as the punchlines that you deliver to your viewers with your youthful ease.
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Your account is a generous archive of the most beautiful love story i’ve ever seen. You drive each other around all the time. You paint each others faces in grotesque animal costume makeup and serve looks. You make spoof insurance adverts dressed up as versions of the insurance company mascots. You dress in boy drag pretending to be basketball players. You dye your curly hair together. You’re pretending to be a cop pulling the other one over in the car. You’re pretending to be a kind yet firm parent. You always switch over so the other one has a go at being the clown. You are at the toy store thinking of best lines to convince people to buy you the expensive water guns. You are driving each other around to the job you both got as event stewards so that you could goof off at work together. Your videos squeeze several consecutive days you spend together from the minute you woke up to the evening one of you says goodnight. You engage in your annual tradition of bob sledding down a steep hill (and the hill doesn’t have snow on it and the sled is just a block of ice). You sing Kelly Clarkson while one of you makes a sandwich and the other eats it and then gives melodramically positive feedback about it. You’re making a diss track about people who vape and you’re in the supermarket taking it in turns to puff on an assortment of objects that are getting comically larger and larger.
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You make these videos daily from the age of 19 to 21, the present day. Scrolling down your profile shows how you have hundreds upon hundreds of videos. None of them are flops, they’re all bangers. It’s awesome how prolific you are.
The only reason you can create in such insane quantities is the same reason your videos are so addictive: It’s the fact that you’re making them for each other, rather than to get views. You create them to make each other laugh, to show each other you appreciate the other. Nothing or nobody else seems to particularly matter. There are many other people online with funny ideas but no one has chemistry like you. Rue and Jules from Euphoria have nothing on you. Be Kind Rewind seem so twee when you’re the real deal. The only experience I could compare this to, I think, might be during the honeymoon period during dating. You’re so committed to making each other laugh. You openly admit you’re each other’s soulmates and refer to each other as the love of your life, alongside other pet names and baby names. But you’re not dating and you have videos dispelling viewer's suspicions you are in a relationship and where you talk about the fact you’re both straight. Part of me wants you guys to be dating, but part of me wonders whether if your friendship is perfect how it is.
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Dating or not I want what you have, but I don’t know if I have experienced anything like it. I wonder whether it’s a result of barriers put down by societal conceptions. Do I have soulmates in my friends, but things get in the way? I love my friends too, but there's a lot of times I'm unsure if I'm caring for and loving them to the extent they deserve.
I recall a book I picked up from Housmans before a recent holiday, it's called BFFS: the radical power of female friendship, and it's by Anahit Behrooz. It unpacks examples of best friendships from media, like the main two women in Elena Ferrante’s novels, Lena Dunham’s Girls, Geffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides, and the relationship between Cristina and Meredith in Greys Anatomy. With the book, Behrooz tries to make the point that there are certain universalities or commonalities about friendship as a woman that have the potential to be politically transformative, and she writes about them largely from a cis and straight perspective.
The book is a little limited but I recognise some of the joys and tensions she outlines in her experiences as a young woman and presently as an adult, who loves, and has loved, several besties. Friendship, specifically in the intimacy of best friendship, is a precious land welcomed to teenage girls and which is often threatened in adulthood directly or indirectly by the pressures of romantic relationships as well as the demands that reproductive labour places on women in the patriarchy.
“Understanding these relationships [close female friendships] in all their passion, friction, and tenderness is less to insist on the totalisation of romantic intimacy in all modes of relation, but rather to liberate the narrative of romance from its heteronormative, monogamous remits. Relationships that are platonic, but also romantic. Not queer, but queered.”
It’s funny this ‘queering’, that Behrooz uses to delineate the bffs who are gay for each other in the traditionally understood sense from the bffs who love each other but not like THAT. I think what i also found tricky about Behrooz’ book was the implied thinking that a dating scenario would undermine the radical power of a 'platonic' friendship: it’s a weird thing to say in a society where lesbianism is oppressed. I find it funny because queers have always been the ones to do friendship in different radical ways anyway. If you asked Audre Lorde she’d probably say something about how all radical social thinking is sapphic. “The true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women,” she wrote.
I’m not gunna lie, I do hope Izzy and Recipe admit they’re gay. That’s regardless of how they want to do their friendship and hold space for the unique thing it is. And if they one day did start dating I would be delighted. But that’s two slightly different things. Friendships need to be nurtured and given special protection. I think whatever kind of structure that challenges given formats of people's relationships in this world is really inspiring. I'm glad that Izzy and Recipe can continue archiving their beautiful, leisurely, devoted relationship to each other for now, and making all their followers laugh in the process.
This one’s for Edie, Angelica, India, Kate, Lizzie, Sharlene, and the years that put distance between us.