"This is for everyone who believes their soulmate is their best friend."
They are not lovers. They are not just roommates. They are each other's platonic life partners. Best friends April and Renee spoke to Brut about what that means ...
They are not lovers. They are not just roommates. They are each other's platonic life partners. Best friends April and Renee spoke to Brut about what that means ...
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00:00I don't know who needs to hear this, but if marriage is not for you, and you want to start a life with your best friend, f***ing do it!
00:19After 11 years of friendship, and 5 years of long distance,
00:23she moved across the world in the middle of a pandemic so we could start a life together.
00:28This is for everyone who believes that their soulmate is their best friend.
00:32We're platonic life partners.
00:34We're not lovers.
00:35And we're not just roommates, and essentially what we are is best friends with a commitment similar to marriage.
00:41So what this means is we are domestic and financial partners, we co-parent our cat together, we live together,
00:48and we are currently looking into any options for us to be legally recognized as each other's first of kin.
00:58So the overlap between BFFs and life partners is where we lie, platonic life partners.
01:13So it shares similar traits to marriage in the sense of financial and domestic partnerships, starting a family together, just without the sex.
01:21Almost half of our friendship has been long distance, with me being in LA and Rene being in Singapore.
01:27Until 2020 when the pandemic hit and we ended up spending almost every day on FaceTime together,
01:33and distance had never really bothered us before, but we realized we just wanted to spend the mundane moments together
01:40because we made the mundane moments magical.
01:42Our friendship outlasted every single one of our romantic relationships,
01:47and we were never really interested in marriage in the traditional sense,
01:52so we decided not to wait around for some hypothetical one,
01:58because we already had such a fulfilling and empowering partnership between the both of us.
02:11I think society has romanticized the idea of the one, and that this one person can be your everything,
02:19but we just think that that's a lot of pressure to put on one person.
02:23And the reason why we shared our story in the first place wasn't to give people another variation of the one to now go search for,
02:31but rather to pursue the connections that most empower them, that makes them feel the best, even if it's not the norm, you know?
02:42Addressing our sleeping arrangements because everyone wants to know if we share a bed.
02:46This is my bed and sleeping area, and Renee's corner is over here.
02:55We often get comments like these.
02:56This is all based on the assumption that romantic love is somehow greater than platonic love, always.
03:06And that is simply not the experience that we have.
03:09One of the most common questions that we get is what happens when one of you falls in love.
03:15So the surprising thing, even to both of us, is that our platonic life partnership has made us better romantic partners to the people that we date.
03:23Because we've already found life companionship with each other, we can actually let romantic connections go at their own natural pace
03:32and not try to guide it towards the default next step toward marriage.
03:37We put our partnership over everyone else, including romantic partners.
03:46This is honestly the most stable and fulfilling relationship that we've had.
03:50Now our next step is to get a joint credit card together and hopefully down the line get a bigger apartment.
03:57Preferably with doors.
03:59Preferably with doors and adopt a new cat.
04:02We just think that your life partner doesn't also have to be your lover.
04:06Yeah, and in our case, it just happened to be a friend.