“In relationships, I’ve observed that a partner can start out as a friend, then become a passion, then a co-parent, a mother or a father of your children, and if you’re really fortunate, the partner remains—or returns as—a friend. It’s a lower-temperature take on a romantic life, but it’s enduring. I have been so fortunate. Great friendships can survive most of the crap thrown at them. They thrive on the manure of shared disappointment and drama. It’s hard to imagine a force as great as romantic love, but friendship comes close. Someone once argued that “friendship is higher than love,” and I understood what they meant. It may not be as melodramatic or grandiose or passionate as love, but friendship is often deeper and wider. Great friendships explain why we hold on to this life so tightly because it disappears so quickly. Just as Ali and I were becoming best friends, I was aware of the wider web of deep friendships we had both grown up in, this sacrament of friendship from the band to the community around us. Relationships we had chosen, not ones chosen for us by blood. Pandemics aside, I still embrace people when I meet them, which goes all the way back to the days of Shalom when that’s how we would say hello. I don’t know that I’ve ever shaken somebody’s hand without having to think about it. My instinct to hail a friend is to hold them.
— Bono, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono” (Knopf, November 1, 2022)
Photo: Bono portrait by John Hewson
