One afternoon, not long after her friend Caroline Knapp died of cancer, Gail Caldwell was sitting with others by the side of a pond, contemplating how they would all cope with the loss, when she blurted something that spoke to an entrenched cultural assumption about fulfilment.
" 'Oh God,' I groaned, with mock distress," she writes in her beautiful memoir Let's Take the Long Way Home about the loss of her friend. "Now I guess I'll have to get a boyfriend."
Sure, it was a volley of combat humour. Ms. Caldwell, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer who lives in Cambridge, Mass., was talking with two of Ms. Knapp's other closest companions - another woman and the man their friend married in her final days. They were in emotional survival mode, shocked by the sudden, gaping hole in their hearts. Ms. Knapp, also an acclaimed writer, had died at the age of 42 a mere two months after diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer.
But Ms. Caldwell knew that her comment revealed an essential - and counterintuitive - truth about their bond. They had known each other for seven years. Both single at the time, they quickly developed a day-to-day closeness, the kind of emotional proximity that causes one to pick up the phone at least once a day and ask the other, "What are you doing?" Between them was the allegiance of being each other's primary go-to person, the one you call when you've lost the car keys or feel unwell, have an idea or want to describe how the leaves outside your window are so beautiful.
They were intimate.
Dare I say it? Happiness with a woman friend? More shocking still, happiness without sex?
We all long to be known. That's what intimacy suggests. Some people think that, ultimately only a God can truly know them. Who hasn't heard people say, "It's between me and my God," when speaking of their innermost thoughts? Others assume that such intimacy comes to fruition with physical connection, the literal nudity of self.
Those cultural beliefs aren't surprising in the Judeo-Christian world. After all, in the Biblical sense, to know someone means sexual intercourse. It's either the Big Guy in the Sky or the One in the Audi who can provide that level of connection.
Which doesn't leave many options for an open, willing heart.
Ms. Caldwell boldly describes the love that culturally doesn't much speak its name. She is unafraid to describe the deep connection she shared with Ms. Knapp. "The dailiness of our alliance was both muted and essential: We were the lattice that made room for the rose," she writes.
Many people assumed they were lesbians or sisters, she confides. Few people - especially men - understand the nature of female relationships. Many women I know, married or in relationships with men, have described how their romantic partners worry about a Sapphic love between best girlfriends. They cannot fathom such closeness, such complete connection, without sexual tension. And that could be because for most men, sex is how they best express such tenderness.
But far from mythologize the sisterhood - female friendships are usually characterized as watch-your-back Mean Girls or as the seamless solidarity of Sex and the City - Ms. Caldwell writes about the beautiful, irritating and sometimes messy texture of their relationship.
"Oh, yes, she could irritate me," Ms. Caldwell says in an interview. "And I her. Caroline could be very difficult." But they could hammer out the testiest emotional issues and yet not hold a grudge against the other when the argument was over. They encouraged competitiveness as writers but "there was never a dark rivalry," she says.
Early on, they confessed their love to each other. In the book, Ms. Caldwell writes about a tearful, scary moment when she admitted to Ms. Knapp how much she needed her.
It may be tempting to characterize the two women as anti-men, old-school feminists, slightly troubled and fiercely independent. They were both former alcoholics. Ms. Knapp was anorexic earlier in her life. Ms. Caldwell had polio as a child.
But Ms. Caldwell dismisses the notion. They connected on many levels - they loved dogs, for example - but "we were not traumatized survivors from troubled romantic pasts," she states.
Rather, they understood enough about happiness (and lack of it) in traditional male-female relationships to know that what we long for with another doesn't always come in the guise one has been inculcated to believe.
"I had a wide, informed spectrum that true, lasting intimacy and romantic relationships were not necessarily one and the same," says Ms. Caldwell, now 59. She had several romantic relationships in her life, even though she never married. They were electric and wonderful while they lasted, she says, "but intimacy in terms of being known was not part of them."
Together, Ms. Caldwell and Ms. Knapp experienced the full gamut of emotional richness. "Maybe sex is a shortcut to vulnerability, whereas if you don't have that, you work toward it," she observes softly.
Love is more canny than we think. It finds the door into people's lives, providing the fulfilment we long for, if we leave a crack open. And when it does, we should feel lucky, blessed. Maybe Ms. Caldwell, who is still single, didn't find it with a man - in life's unpredictable movements of chance and fate, love doesn't always happen as we thought it would or should - but she found it with another human being. A soulmate can come in any gender.
In retrospect, Ms. Caldwell now sees that Caroline Knapp could very well be the great love of her life. "Maybe I just didn't know it," she says quietly on the phone. "I would definitely say it was the most fulfilling and most gratifying relationship of my life."