Our intense connection fit no category. Would we be allowed to keep it?
One of the most intimate relations in Chinese culture is known as the “zhiji” — the “know-self,” one who knows you like you know yourself. This is a connection outside of any social role, something beyond even best-friendship, like a platonic soul mate. The Chinese describe the feeling a know-self inspires as different from friendly, romantic or familial feelings: It is considered a fourth kind of feeling.
It is friendship with a certain spark, but not quite romance — the ideal spiritual relationship.
In a song whose title translates to “Blue Know-Self,” the Chinese singer Chen Rui sings about a feeling that is “Not the clinging of a lover but lingering like wine.” Not oceanic passion but “a faint yearning, like a small blue river with tiny waves.”
My know-self and I met at a summer writing camp where we spent four hours a day, five days a week, for six weeks, reading and commenting on each other’s writing. Everybody in our workshop knew that he and I loved each other’s stories, which meant we loved each other’s souls.
I knew from the beginning that he had a long-term partner and that it was not possible between us, in the traditional way. But we got close. Know-selves are rare: The ancient Chinese believed that to find even one in the world was more difficult than finding 10,000 pieces of gold.
Friends forever, we promised each other. He did not keep our closeness a secret from his partner. I did not need to keep it a secret from anyone, and yet our mutual affection felt strange to me: I did not know what to do with the bigness of it. I wanted to support his loving, monogamous relationship of 15 years, about which he only said good things, not threaten it. And yet our closeness felt precarious, still.
I have lost platonic friends to marriages before, and this felt more than platonic, though less than romantic. I wanted to find a precedent for it, but even among my unconventional friends, I couldn’t find a model of the kind of intimacy I wanted that did not involve sex, dating or polyamory.
Share
Print
