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When Men Weren’t Afraid to Love Their Friends - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 1,868 words · saved by 1 readers

One of my favorite monuments looks like it belongs to a married couple. Draped in marble flowers and guarded by fat cherubs, it features two stone portraits joined by a knotted cloth, and script that describes an intimate bond: a “beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls and a companionship undivided during thirty-­six complete years.” But this memorial has nothing to do with a husband and a wife. It commemorates a friendship—one between two men, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, Renaissance-era doctors who traveled, worked, and lived together in the 1600s and were buried side by side at Christ’s College in Cambridge. “They who while living had mingled their interests, fortunes, counsels, nay rather souls,” reads their tombstone, “might in the same manner, in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes.” This exuberant expression of love is a far cry from popular depictions of male friendship today, which tend to portray men as struggling with vulnerability, or reticent to form bonds

One of my favorite monuments looks like it belongs to a married couple. Draped in marble flowers and guarded by fat cherubs, it features two stone portraits joined by a knotted cloth, and script that describes an intimate bond: a “beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls and a companionship undivided during thirty-­six complete years.” But this memorial has nothing to do with a husband and a wife. It commemorates a friendship—one between two men, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, Renaissance-era doctors who traveled, worked, and lived together in the 1600s and were buried side by side at C

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