Friends – true, hardcore, steeped in your bones friends – are the only legit ‘ride or dies’ in a lifetime.
Relationships with blood family can be complex, to say the least. As much as we crack pained jokes about having to sit next to a problematic relative at Christmas (hi, Uncle Rod*) and what it is to disassociate during long drives with our ageing parents, it’s more often than not our friends who show up for us in genuinely significant and life-altering ways. The house move, the airport run, the heartbreak so paralysing we forget to wear pants and literally walk into our local 7-Eleven to buy a box of Barbecue Shapes sobbing with our vagina on full display. Like a living lockbox, our friends hold the secret shames of our shared past – the ill-advised haircuts, the NYE liaison with a fire-twirler named Denim, or the fact we auditioned to get on Love Island at least three times.
Romantic partners come and go too, but when you dare to glance back down the undulating and occasionally lightly traumatic timeline of your past, I bet certain platonic faces keep appearing. Whether they be someone you bonded with as a nipper hiding out in the school library during lunch breaks (introverts represent), or a delightful later-in-life surprise mortal that you stumbled upon during the school run, or via mutuals in a bar, or after running them over with your electric scooter (cute!), those human bollards gently anchoring our chaotic path are almost certainly the reason we’re still alive. And we take them for granted, because we don’t have socially sanctioned or ceremonial ways to honour them. Until now.
Heteronormative patriarchal structures are out, bb – if you really want to commit to your heart famiglia in a tangible and symbolic way, marry them. That’s right, I said it. Marry your friends! Marry a whole tonne of them. Stand in front of each and every person you would phone immediately after getting arrested to say “oopsie daisy, the Thing happened again!” and tell them from the deepest recesses of your sticky soul why you love them, why you’re grateful they’re alive, and that you pledge to honour, nurture and protect them and celebrate their wins even in moments where your life resembles a Rob Schneider roast by comparison. Wear a veil or a top hat, or don’t, but write down your vows and look into their eyes and tell them in front of the world that without them you’d be lost, or dead, or even worse: an actual contestant on Love Island.
My beloved mate Emilie Zoey Baker (who I would take a goddamned bullet for) and I identified this ‘gap in the market’ – and since 2019 we have been creating opportunities for best friends of all flavours of the friendship spectrum to ‘put a ring on it’ – virtual, Cheezel, or whatever floats your lime spider. We invented the event Marry Your Friends [and it’s coming to the Sydney Opera House for the fabulous All About Women festival in March, more on this below!]. We have an arch and a celebrant and everything. It’s super official – except in a legal sense, obviously – we invite you and a dearest buddy (or buddies plural, there have been many examples of throuple and polycule friendship-nuptials, and we are here for it) to take a moment to scribble some vows, get misty-eyed, and show the universe that you’d be nothing without your beautiful comrades.
So make it a formal commitment, and start planning that retirement commune, or your answer to the Golden Girls condo, or the villa in Italy where you’ll get old and disgraceful together. Guide each other through middle-age, pensionhood and beyond – all those griefs and loves and losses and victories, past and future – bound forever by shared memory, ferocious devotion, and knowing that once, a long time ago in a lighter world, you threw convention out the window and married the person you’ll always know as your Best Friend.
(*Don’t worry, he’s dead.)
Marieke Hardy and Emilie Zoey Baker are bringing ‘Marry Your Friends’ to the Sydney Opera House on Sunday, March 9, for All About Women 2025. Mate-rimony ceremonies are complete with marriage vows, a celebrant, a commemorative wedding photograph, and official(ish) paperwork. There are two ways to be involved – as a marriage participant, or as a wedding guest. Tickets are $35+bf. Find out more about the event and how to pitch getting hitched to your best bud over here.
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