Emma Sednaoui
The Open Door
From the corner of my eye, I see her. She’s surrounded by people, glowing. I start running toward her until I’m close enough to be heard.
‘Barbra, Barbra!’
She turns, the crowd melts away. The hair is impossibly tall, the eyeliner cat-like, the eyes this piercing blue. I grab her pale hands.
‘I want to thank you. You saved my life. You saved my life.’
– Amazing. Does it mean you’re truly over your him, then?
I liked my therapist’s reaction after telling him about this dream. I liked the meaning he pressed onto it. Of course it meant I was over him. I had been relieved, almost weightless, the day I left him.
The interesting part was not the ex, but the link to The Way We Were, Sydney Pollack’s film with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford: a love story that keeps trying to find itself through its differences. He, in the Jewish communist loudness of her; she, in the unattainable ease of bourgeois intellectual luxury.
I had seen it a few months earlier, and that last scene where Katie runs into Hubble on the street, a hand on his cheek, whispering with sparkling eyes ‘Your girl is lovely, Hubble.’ lodged itself somewhere deep in me. Like every girl that saw it, I think.
A whole Sex and the City episode was built around it. The four women circling the idea that sometimes the man leaves not for something better, but for something easier—someone less demanding, ‘less complicated’ than for example, Carrie. It lands, uncomfortably, in a kind of self-misogyny dressed up as insight, while also pointing to something more ordinary: the pull toward relationships that don’t require constant negotiation, where balance is not something you have to chase every day.
The night before the dream, I saw a photo of my ex with another girl. Cozy, soft. And I surprised myself by not feeling anything. No jealousy, no bitterness. Just a strange calm.
And so I understood why Barbra, or Katie, her character in the movie, had appeared. The film had left me with a lesson I hadn’t been able to articulate. You can spend years reshaping yourself, trimming down the edges: less loud, less difficult, less political, more pliable, trying to fit into the idea of the ‘right’ girl. The quiet one. The wife. You do it for the blond, attractive, promising young man who wants you to be easier than you are. Eventually you both end up exasperated, revolted even, by the person the other refuses to become. By the person you can’t help but be.
**
It’s funny how much of my mental space ends up revolving around my relationship to men – thinking about them, overanalyzing them, talking about them. I joke with my friends that we’d instantly fail the Bechdel test. But I don’t even see myself as someone obsessed with them. Half the time, I don’t understand them, and often I’m more critical than romantic about it all.
It is the idea of connection, of building a life with someone. Which feels contradictory sometimes, because I’ve built myself around being independent, outspoken, self-sufficient. As if wanting love somehow cancels out ambition, curiosity, creativity. But apparently the emotional part still takes up most of the space.
With the same therapist, the conversation turned, again, to exhaustion. Not the dramatic kind, only the low persistent fatigue that settles into work, into the future, into situations that cannot be repaired because they were built on misplaced trust. There was also the familiar question of men, of watching the same dynamics recur with slightly altered faces. A close friend had once suggested that the real problem was not conflict itself but the avoidance of fights, problems and doubts that, in practice, exist almost exclusively internally, known only by me. Which was not entirely true. There were the friends, after all – ‘the Council’ the small tribunal of friends kept updated with screenshots, transcripts, running commentary, evidence submitted in real time of whatever minor catastrophe was unfolding in front of me.
To that, my therapist said:
‘You know that in love there is also friendship.
And it feels like, for you, it only works the other way around.’
And in that unraveling, I began to question what I actually mean when I say friendship, when I say love – whether I’ve been confusing the latter, or asking one to perform the labor of the other.
**
It was December, and this year my family reunited in our house in Egypt, where my dad lives. I was back in the house I grew up in, my favourite place on earth.
Growing up there, all I did for six first years of life was play with my friends, who were, conveniently, the neighbors’ kids. Every morning I’d wake up, go to the front door, and open it. That meant the day had started, the field was open. My friends would run inside, we’d sit around the kitchen table, and plan what games we’d play. Would we play hide and seek inside the house for hours, or go outside and explore the world like a group of adventurers, with the Egyptian countryside as our territory? That’s all we did in repeat, and I cannot remember a time when I was happier.
This Christmas, I sat in that same house alone. The friends have grown now. They have families, jobs, obligations, distances. Some have moved away. Gender, too, has intervened, erecting boundaries that didn’t exist before we knew what they meant. The intimacy we had is no longer possible, or at least no longer simple.
And sitting there, in that familiar quiet, it occurred to me that before I knew anything about being a girl, about independence, about desire or ambition or self-definition, I knew how to be a friend. That was the first role I inhabited instinctively. The first way I understood myself in relation to others.
Once, I had a great time with my dad around a beer, which doesn’t happen often. It’s actually so rare that the moment itself felt almost exceptional. A long time ago, silently and mutually, we seemed to decide that we were both better off staying mostly out of each other’s lives.
As we were sitting in my city, I was giving him news about my friends, what we had done over the summer, who was where, who was still around. At some point, he said, ‘With you anyway, it’s always been friends first.’ (he actually said ‘les copains d’abord’ which refers to a french song by George Brassens about a group of friends which has always been one of my dearest songs, of course).
And there it was: even a man who knew almost nothing about me could recognize the pattern I live by: friendship first, the network of people around me. It wasn’t flattering or sentimental; it was just true. This is the architecture of my life, the structure I rely on, whether I notice it or not.
**
Today, I have many friends. Not all of them close, not all of them constant. Some are people I speak to every day, others I haven’t seen or spoken to in months. Some live near me, others far enough away that our friendship exists mostly through updates and memory. My life, in practice, is structured through this dispersed network rather than any single fixed community.
Strangely enough, friendships also tend to end with relative clarity. They fade, or fracture, or simply stop aligning. Some friends are meant for a specific moment. Life, choices, and arguments can end a friendship very quickly. I can usually move through it, because I can acknowledge what we shared and feel genuinely grateful for it.
But this is not how I behave in love.
I saw a TikTok once, one of those videos in which a woman speaks softly and with the authority of someone explaining weather patterns or grief, and she used the word limerence, which struck me less as a diagnosis than as a familiar condition I had somehow failed to name.
I can date someone for two weeks and still feel their absence long after they’re gone. Longer than I even knew them, sometimes. Not necessarily because of who they really were, but because of everything I imagined around them. The potential, the projection, the version of the story I had already started building in my head.
It is strange, because my friends are still the centre of my life. They know me better, love me better, stay longer. And yet romantic endings affect me more than almost anything else. I keep wondering whether it has something to do with the fact that the men I see are not my friends. I hate it when they ask to ‘stay friends’ after a breakup. I always answer the same way.
‘But we are not friends.’
***
The obvious conclusion would be to start dating one of my friends, but that has always been the one rule I’ve never broken. If I were interested in them that way, they wouldn’t be my friend in the first place. They would be my crush.
One hot spring evening, I was smoking a last cigarette before bed with a friend, trying to explain why I couldn’t end things with a man I was seeing, who by that point was not really seeing me back.
My friend listened in the way friends do when they already know the shape of the story and are waiting for you to arrive there yourself. At some point she said that we are like addicts of love, and that withdrawal feels like it will kill you, when in reality it is the drug that does the damage. It was not phrased as advice so much as observation.
We stayed with that idea for a while, as if it had been left on the table between us. That friend is the kind who interrupts the cycle, who refuses to participate in the ritual of relapse, who keeps you, sometimes against your will, at a distance from your own repetition. And where romantic partners often function differently: not as refuge but as the very mechanism of return. The return to the same uncertainty, the same anticipation, the same private negotiation of meaning.
And I realized that what I feared losing was not even the person anymore, but the chemical comfort of wanting them, the distraction of obsession, the temporary suspension of myself. While I know love can be as narcissistic as it is sincere, perhaps what unsettles me in it is the loss of stability, the sense that control was never really possible. There is more comfort, after all, in being loved than in loving. But this does not seem true of friendship, which defines the self as much as it defines the other. I am someone’s friend because, most often, they are mine as well.
When I was a child the door of the house was always open, children coming in and out to play without asking. Maybe love feels the same to me now, the door is still left open for people to enter, and sometimes to leave. Still, it exists in the beauty of the memory as exes and old relationships can still appear in dreams.
The dream wasn’t about my ex. It was about how I have often existed in the eyes of others, defined first by the group, and only later, if ever, by myself. Like Barbra Streisand at the end of The Way We Were, walking away from a version of herself that only ever fully existed through someone’s dependency and the need to be loved by the other one.
And still, I’m not sure I would call that the point. Maybe what I’ve been circling, without quite being able to say it directly, is not a separation between love and friendship at all, but the way I keep trying to make them do each other’s job – as if one could finally stabilize what the other keeps undoing. AQ