So, Are You Two Together? (Part 4)

Liz's love, a theoretical physicist, meanders down our street clapping. Standing beside a triple-decker house, he cocks his head, listening to the sharp sounds reverberating off of a vinyl-sided wall. He's designing an exercise for the students in the "Physics of Music" class that he's assistant-teaching. When he's done, he'll come back inside to find Liz and me draped across the sofa, discussing urban sprawl. We'll all make dinner together, and if I feel like it, I might join them for a night out, or I might head off with the guy that I'm seeing.

I date scientists too, men who understand what it is to experiment, to question and wonder. Liz's love or mine might sit in our kitchen scrawling equations into a notebook, or disappear for days to orbit with subatomic particles or speak with machines. These men are wise enough to see that the Boston marriage works to their advantage. Liz and I keep each other company. Our Boston marriage has made it easier for us to enjoy the men in our lives.

But how do we commit to each other, knowing that someday one of us may marry? One of us might fall in love with something other than a man — a solar cabin in Mexico, a job in Tangier, a documentary film project in Florida, a year of silence in the Berkshire woods. Any number of things could pull us apart. We have made no promises to each other, signed no agreements to commit. For some reason, that seems O.K. most of the time.

For this article, I talked to many women who'd formed platonic marriages or who'd thought about it seriously. All of them discussed the complicated issues of commitment, or lack thereof, between friends.

Janet calls her arrangement with Greta intentional. "In the same vein as creating an 'intentional community,' we have an 'intentional' living arrangement," she says. The two high school friends, both straight women in their early thirties, moved to Boston together five years ago, knowing that they would share an apartment, and a life. They eat dinner together and check in with the how-was-your-day conversation most people expect from a mate.

"Greta is the person I say to contact when I fill out emergency cards," Janet tells me. "She is the first person I would turn to if I needed help. "

And yet, the two have left their future open, and the promises they have made to each other are full of what-ifs. If Greta doesn't marry by the time she's 35, they might raise a child together. It's the what-ifs that drive many women away from closeness with each other.

One married woman, I'll call her Lisa, says she's deeply disappointed with the way women treat their friendships as disposable, dumping friends when an erotic partner comes along. "Even though my friends and I used to talk about buying a house together, we all knew at some level that it wasn't going to work. Ultimately, we would betray each other, find a man, marry him. I got married because I knew everybody else was going to. If I knew I could trust a friendship with a woman — that there was a way of making a friendship into a bona fide, future-oriented relationship — I would rather have that than be married."

As for me, I've come to think of commitment as something beyond a marriage contract, a joint bank account, or even a shared child. I know that eventually Liz and I may drift to other houses, other cities. Yet I can picture us reuniting at age 80, to settle down in an old-age home together. Maybe we will have husbands, maybe not, but we'll still be conspirators. We'll probably harangue the youngsters who spoon spinach onto our plates about the importance of forming a union; we'll attend protests with signs duct-taped to our walkers; maybe we'll write an opera and perform it using some newfangled technology that lets us float in the air. Liz and I are committed. We share a vision of the kind of people we want to be and the world we want to inhabit.

"We formed a family core with the possibility of exhilaration," wrote Zoe Zolbrod in her article. "Yet Hallmark never even named a goddamn holiday after us, can you believe it?" We're not sure what to call ourselves. We have no holidays. We don't know what our future holds. We have only love and the story we are making up together.