Marriage is in crisis, relationships are in crisis, love is in crisis – and only an unbounded desire for friendship might save us from solitude

I meet Hélène Giannecchini shortly before the Milan presentation of An Unbounded Desire for Friendship (Iperborea, translated by Caterina Orsenigo). We are in a place that is, at least technically, in the centre of Milan, and yet all around us there are only lawns and trees and squirrels, and none of the city’s noise seems to reach us. A kind of enclave, a suspended parenthesis, a breath of oxygen.

“Kiss your friends more,” begins a poem by Lora Mathis that kept coming back to me while reading the book. I first encountered it at a friend’s house; he keeps it framed on his desk. I wonder how many times he has read it. “Destroy the belief that intimacy must be reserved for monogamous relationships,” it continues, and this is precisely what Giannecchini’s book is about: intimacy and care, shared lives and possible futures, desire and relationships that shape a life yet rarely find legal recognition, all outside the often suffocating, sometimes violent frame of romantic love.

An Unbounded Desire for Friendship is a distinctly queer book. This is hardly surprising: long before Millennials began, at least in theory, to experiment with alternative relational structures, LGBTQIA+ communities were already imagining forms of coexistence grounded in friendship rather than marriage, out of necessity as much as invention. When a society excludes you, you stay close to those like you; when family withdraws, you build another one from whatever forms of affection remain.

It is also, in part, a photographic book: within its pages, groups of friends look into the camera, embrace one another, and seem, so often misunderstood or rendered invisible in life, to finally be allowed to breathe again. And it is, finally, a book in which the author tells her own story: her relationships, the loves that turned into friendships, lifelong bonds, her family.

“I have three parents,” she writes. “A mother and two fathers. My mother fell in love for the first time at nineteen, and again at twenty-five. She realised early on that she loved both men, and since she refused to choose, and neither of them wanted to leave, they invented a new way of living together. Their three-way story lasted fifteen years.”

ⓢ You grew up in a non-canonical family. I imagine that must have shaped the way you experience relationships today.

My parents weren’t hippies; in many respects it was a serious, almost conventional family. My mother taught Latin: there were rules, schedules, a fairly strict sense of order. It’s just that two men had fallen in love with her, then became friends, and at some point it felt natural for all three to live together.

In our house, friendship was the central value. There was always someone coming and going, a constant circulation of people and relationships. When one of my fathers later moved in with another woman, a friend of my parents came to live with us. It wasn’t always understood or approved of, but it taught me that love is not fixed once and for all, that it can be invented, and can take different forms. I also see people who grew up in more traditional contexts moving in that direction: it feels like a contemporary tendency, not just my personal story.

ⓢ Speaking of the present: in Italy, Geoffrey de Lagasnerie’s 3 – An Aspiration to the Outside (L’Orma) came out last year. It addresses many of the same questions you explore, and takes a very harsh view of the traditional family.

De Lagasnerie and I approach similar themes from different directions: he is a sociologist, I come from literature; he writes about a bourgeois milieu, while I have focused more on fragile social contexts, especially in the United States; and he is very severe towards those who choose a traditional family or have children, whereas I did not want to oppose the two models, which is also why I included my biological family in the book.

What interests me, rather, is the difference between real, sincere bonds that can emerge within a family and the ideological framework imposed by the political right, which ultimately harms everyone. My aim is not to dismantle one model, but to ask whether coexistence might be possible.

ⓢ Let’s talk about marriage: can a queer family exist within the same legal structures as the traditional family?

I was struck by an article by Judith Butler in which she links the nation to the etymology of birth, showing how family and homeland are conceptually intertwined. I don’t believe institutions can simply be changed from within; more often, they are what end up transforming us. That is why, rather than reforming marriage, I am more interested in the idea of pirating it. Why, for instance, couldn’t I marry two friends?

Rights-based struggles are essential, but they cannot be the endpoint. We should also ask whether these legal frameworks can be reimagined altogether.

ⓢ It still seems we are far from a political discourse that includes the rights of friends.

And yet something is shifting. In France there is now discussion of a proposal to grant certain rights to friendship: access to social housing, or bereavement leave, rights currently reserved for relatives or spouses, but not for the people we actively choose as companions in life. It is a signal.

For Saint-Just, more than two centuries ago, friendship was a civic duty: he argued that a man without friends should be excluded from society because he cannot be a good citizen. It is a provocation, but it contains a truth: friendship is a political feeling, because it breaks the isolation of both the private family unit and the individual.

ⓢ Photography plays an important role in the book. It is not just documentation: it seems to restore space to lives that have remained at the margins.

For me, photographs are a real engine of writing. I collect them obsessively, from archives, flea markets, through friends. During this project I accumulated more than two hundred; I keep them on my desk, move them around, assign them to chapters.

I am especially drawn to anonymous images, those that no longer have a recognisable context. I am moved by forgotten lives, particularly queer ones, of which only fragile traces remain, and which literature can, in a sense, restore, give form to again. But I try to proceed carefully. It is not about appropriating those lives, but about starting from small clues, a date, a gesture, a background, to build something that returns a form of attention.

ⓢ You write that stepping outside the bourgeois family also means abandoning the idea that only long-lasting relationships matter.

Yes, this is something I care deeply about. I draw on Jack Halberstam’s observation that, in our culture, duration is the main criterion of value. If a relationship is recent, it is considered insignificant; if it lasts years, it becomes “serious.” In that sense, the family always has an advantage, because it is seen as the original relationship but this is a distortion.

I have received more from people I met at a party one night than from certain relatives over an entire lifetime. We should stop thinking in terms of duration and start thinking in terms of intensity and reciprocity. Friendships end, loves end; it is painful, but it does not erase what was shared. We need to learn how to domesticate endings.

ⓢ Toward the end you quote a slogan from AIDS-era activism: “An army of lovers cannot lose.” In common sense, sexuality is often seen as the boundary that separates friendship from love.

The idea that sex clearly separates friendship from love does not really hold, especially in queer experience, where there is far greater fluidity. For me, being queer goes beyond sexual orientation or gender identity: it means dismantling categories and allowing continuity between different forms of bond.

Where dominant culture insists on separation in order to isolate us further, continuity between love, friendship and desire opens a shared space of intimacy through which we can exist more fully, politically as well. I am not interested in dividing everything into compartments, but in allowing relationships to remain complex, hybrid, and alive.

A breath of oxygen.