Clémence Guetté, a member of the French National Assembly and of the leftist party La France Insoumise, published a book this August titled 'Pour une politique de l’amitié' (For a Politics of Friendship) in which the central argument is that friendships should be given legal recognition and attendant benefits that are usually reserved for what is traditionally understood as “family”. This month, she put forth the book’s theories as a proposal for a bill under which important friendships can be consolidated into civil contracts, with meaningful implications for inheritance, caregiving, housing, employment benefits and more.
Guetté’s proposed Bill No. 3145 has a few precedents: Belgium allows for statutory co-habitation between consenting adults which includes rights over a deceased friend’s property; and parts of North America such as Alberta in Canada and Colorado in the United States recognise “adult interdependent relationships” and registered friendships. France, Canada and the USA all permit queer marriage and domestic partnerships, so these existing and projected laws specifically address bonds that are platonic or non-romantic in nature and without basis in blood, marriage or adoption.
The concept has yet to take root globally, but extralegally speaking, the building and sustaining of community has long been both a theoretical and practical tenet of progressive movements. In India, the term “community” is often used to describe identity and belonging within exclusionary structures, such as caste or religion and even gated residential spaces. But the term has broader, inclusive meanings. To build and sustain a community is to create personal and local networks and environments in which the needs of many are met, irrespective of what systems and authorities provide. One does this on a personal level as well, intentionally cultivating symbiotic chosen kinship so as to have a support system for life. Access to and collaboration with a community is one thing, but for some, a true friendship proves more valuable than either family ties or partnership. Such connections require and deserve protected recognition too.
Enshrining close friendship bonds from a legal perspective provides advantages not only for people who presently have few or no relatives or are not in committed partnerships, but also for those whose life circumstances will come to change in unexpected ways. Rare are those who, through the course of a lifetime, remain clustered within a network of known beloveds whose proximity, trustworthiness, longevity, financial resources, well-being, and bandwidth never shift. Upheavals come in many ways, and life is full of vagaries.
Reimagining kinship beyond consanguinity, matrimony, and other structures that are family- or partner-oriented — that is, reimagining and renaming what “family” itself means — is a beautiful, challenging, and sometimes a very necessary project. Of course, human relationships being what they are, what is a registered friendship one year may become a friendship divorce the next, but that doesn’t matter. It is in the building and the nurturing, and not in the breaking down, that we put ourselves into any kind of relationship. For many of us, especially those whose life choices have not always had societal aegis, the essential nature of friendship has already been established. Legal safeguards for it are worth dreaming of, working towards, and fighting for too.