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Friendship runs deep in individuals and in humanity. It's an essential fact of life for most people, a vast collection of relationships reported to lower blood pressure and the risk of depression and provide social interaction and connection in an increasingly disconnected age. It's immortalized in songs and in its own section at Hallmark. When it works it survives bridesmaid horrors, periods of remarkable self-absorption and the collection of bumps and bruises that life gives every relationship. It can be painful and it can be glorious.
But should it be legalized?
Arguments for and against legally recognizing friendships came out this summer, first in an essay by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow in the Boston Globe and then in a response blog post from Jane Gross at the New York Times Health Blog.
Tuhus-Dubrow wrote about what she calls a "nascent movement" among scholars to give designated friends legal rights and responsibilities, from access to the Family Medical Leave Act and write-offs for certain "friend expenditures" to the right to make health-care decisions and even just ride in an ambulance or visit a hospital room should a friend get sick.
While some of her sources said that the government shouldn't be involved in everything and this kind of movement encourages too much control, others said that it's just the ticket for people who don't have a family support system for times of need.
Gross doesn't have children and has made a few arrangements with friends to serve as health-care proxies and potential roommates, but in her essay "Single, Childless and Terrified" she says that as a "single, childless woman" she lives in fear that there will be no one to care for her when she needs it the most.
But, having witnessed the “new old age’’ from a front-row seat, I’m
haunted by the knowledge that there is no one who will care about me in
the deepest and most loving sense of the word at the end of my life. No
one who will advocate for me, not simply for adequate care but for the
small and arguably inessential things that can make life worth living
even in compromised health.
Gross suggests that friendship should be lifted from its "second-class status," given some clout. Reader comments are sad, hopeful, angry and resigned. Alex says a lonely old-age is what selfish people who haven't chosen to raise children get, especially if they have money left over. Jen in Astoria says she's going to be just fine regardless and doesn't appreciate Gross's "fear-mongering." Presumably a very different Alex says,
How amusing! You assume that those people with children are somehow not
going to be magically stuffed into a nursing home and ignored by those
children.
Hey, I get it. Single, childless, here - although not terrified, yet. And since after years of social work with seniors I'm in touch with the realities of aging - financial and daily caregiving aspects - it's crossed my mind that not having kids or a spouse removes a common layer of human beings who are both legally tied (in the case of the spouse and frequently in the case of the kids) and emotionally connected enough to make sure I don't waste away alone.
This assumes that those people in the traditional roles are there at all. Let's face it - it's often a couple of my friends now who've got my back, along with my sister, and those are the people I would trust in a serious jam. Some of my married friends know they could depend on me or another of their close friends should there be a serious problem or absence of a nuclear family. One friend who recently separated from her husband just put me down as an emergency contact at her child's school, because her family is in another state. Most of my closest friends are young enough to have living parents who are still involved with our lives, single or coupled, so we're still benefitting from that support system in a variety of ways. I'm confident I'd be writing a different response to this in 10 or 15 years. Divorces happen (and already have.) Kids move away. Older relatives die.
Increases in domestic partnerships and civil unions in recent years include rights that some quoted in Tuhus-Dubrow's article say should be allowed for friends as well.
"If the law decides to support some relationships, why not others that
similarly involve care and support?" asks Washington University's
Rosenbury. "What is it about marriage or marriage-like relationships -
that is, relationships that are assumed
