Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship

by Kayleen Schaefer

It’s about us knowing how unsettling it can feel when you’ve been surrounded by friends and then are suddenly by yourself again.

Women who might have assumed they could find care, kindness, and deep conversations only in romantic relationships are no longer limited to that plotline.

“We don’t have external structures in place to keep us close,” Hopper says, “and it’s still true that if I text a friend and don’t hear back in a certain amount of time there’s anxiety, and it could be anxiety about the friendship or about them.”

This isnt jut with frds. Anxiety exists always

We have to continue acknowledging how necessary these relationships are, whether it’s making friends our emergency contacts at the doctor, our yearly Thanksgiving companions, or the people we reach for first whenever anything good, awful, or irritating happens.

I dont think acknowledging is wat is needed

This book is about the validation—and celebration—of our friendships, but it’s also only a start. The conversation about how important other women can be in our lives has just begun. —

When she was a young wife and mother, she thought of friendships as an indulgence. They were nice, but not essential. What she was responsible for was taking care of her family, so she restrained herself from being interested in anything that would get in the way of that.

This history helps explain how the idea that women can’t trust each other, that we’re better off forgoing friendship because eventually we’re going to fail at it, became so intractable. Men told us not to rely on our own sex—and turn to them instead.

“I saw my mom have friendships when I was growing up that were incredibly important to her,” Emily says, “people who were treated like family and loved like family, and I think that’s probably where I got some of the motivation to be a really good friend.”

(in the movie, Hillary has a heart disease and dies when her daughter is about eleven).

Spoiler alert

“The big fights are about jealousy and seeing that your friend has done all of the stuff that you never managed to pull off and all of the competitiveness that’s been going on,” Donoghue says. “I think that’s much closer to what happens between two women.”

In part, Summer Sisters is about finding that friend who feels like magic to you, as if you can’t believe she picked you to share secrets with. “What I’m talking about is how girls fall in love with their best friends,” Blume says. “I mean it’s not a sexual thing, but it’s, I don’t know if Mary would say this, but it was like falling in love. It was just like being together was so much fun, and again it might be very different for her. But that’s how it was. It was always great, just spending time together, being together, our crazy senses of humor.”

That’s just what we did. Our general operating principle was that it’s fine, and expected, to knock other girls down.

This is a classic structure of friendships in books, but it also seems to be true in real life. At that age, if you are a shy or introverted teen, you’re drawn to the energy of the complicated girl, and if you’re a complicated girl, you’re drawn to the stability of the introvert.”

I never even considered saying no. I didn’t even like him. All I saw was prom and my opportunity to go.

Now I wouldn’t even look at a guy one of my friends was into, but that doesn’t change the fact that back then I pushed aside any regret I was feeling and went ahead with the date. I

Not all mean girls are popular, and not all popular girls are mean. The truth is, girls are no meaner or nicer than anyone else. I wasn’t the only person caught up in acting how the rest of my friends were because I was afraid of being rejected by them. I wasn’t the only one who thought prom was the only fancy party I’d ever get invited to and was willing to do anything to go. I wasn’t the only one just trying to make it through adolescence.

I should have been able to figure out how to say that I didn’t know how to turn down a boy’s attention, or that I’d rather not come along, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still your friend. But I didn’t.

But now with some of these girls, we’re actually real friends. All of these years later, I’d just do anything for them. Like right now if they called and needed anything, I would do anything possible that I could to make their lives better.”

I didn’t think about much beyond that all of these girls were cheering—cheering!—because I had ended up on their doorstep. It didn’t occur to me to question why.

I never even came close to lifelong friendships. I didn’t have any friends in my sorority, mostly because of my own actions.

Barely anyone said hello to me, and I was too shy to say hi to them first.

But I didn’t because I liked the attention.

It never occurred to me that the effort I put into scheming how to approach a guy about a date party or get him that crush T-shirt in secret could have been used to get to know my sisters better—and I’m not sure they thought about this either. Men were a really important part of the sorority, and we all took this seriously.

I think the notcknowing it would be about boys is bullshit

I quit the sorority two years after joining. I quit because I met a guy I really liked.

He wanted this too, so I didn’t need the sorority to help me find a guy anymore.

These were mostly women I met in my freshman dorm. They were funny, independent, and opinionated, more comfortable with who they were and confident than I was then. I liked that about them.

College was the first time I realized that a group of women could look out for and take care of each other—my friends did just that. We were always at parties and bars, usually because some guy was maybe going to be there too, but we never ditched each other.

Freshman year, one friend and I both had a crush on the same guy. I didn’t have the guts to tell her when I hooked up with him, which makes me disappointed in myself even now. When she found out, she was sad, and I was too. We stayed friends while we were both infatuated with him, even though there were some moments when we both thought the other one was being a jerk.

“My femininity is my white noise, the creaks and groans of the house that is my body.”

J.e buntin

I was still happily dating my college boyfriend and wasn’t interested in helping any other women through their lives, romantic or otherwise, or letting them help me through mine. I’d forgotten the way my college friends and I had comforted and encouraged each other. Instead, I spent most of my time pointed toward men.

The guys around me every day (most of the staff was male) acted like what we were doing was smart and valuable, so I treated it like very important work too.

I’ve watched boys do stuff my whole life too.

The author befor ws talking bout her sons...

I called these guys my friends, and they were; in part these were simple relationships: I liked them and they liked me back. But what I also liked was the notion of being around them, perhaps more than I did actually talking about their art or playing poker. If you have convinced yourself, like I did, that what men like are the smartest and most interesting things to like, then being allowed to hang around them—being one of the guys—is heady. I felt intelligent and edgy when I was with them, in no danger of being just another empty-headed girl.

I was so focused on the boys and being the kind of woman they wanted around that I dismissed any woman who wasn’t as into guy stuff as I was, which, as I saw it, was most women.

I still wanted to belong, but this time I wanted to be one of the guys.

What I heard wasn’t “Kayleen doesn’t like other women.” I heard “Kayleen isn’t like other women.”

She was highly feminine. If she had a rough day at work, she’d treat herself to a cupcake.

Once I had established myself as this chill person who happily soaked up anything men say, I had no idea how to express opinions or emotions that didn’t sync up with theirs.

Marriage was something to look forward to, I was taught. Without a husband, you were supposed to feel incomplete.

I wanted my friends to consider me as necessary as they had become to me. I wanted them to know that these were long-term relationships and that I’d be there for them, too, in any way they might want.

society often indicates to women that it’s not on the same level as the other relationships in our lives, such as the ones with our romantic partners, our children, or even our jobs. Devoting ourselves to finding spouses, caring for children, or snagging a promotion is acceptable, productive behavior. Spending time strengthening our friendships, on the other hand, is seen more like a diversion.

It’s about taking friendship as seriously as any other relationship and not thinking about friendship as a plan B to tide you over until you get married or meet a romantic partner.”

Before I went to sleep, I sent her the kind of “amazing night” text I would send to a first date I was sure I wanted to see again. The next day I texted my mom: “I have a new best friend,” I wrote. “I love her.”

a journal of the American Psychological Association, that showed that women often have a “tend-and-befriend” response to stress, instead of a “fight-or-flight” one.

They didn’t have to be consolation prizes until I found someone to marry. They could be as fundamental as any other designated pairing society okayed, even though they’re not secured by anything beyond feeling.

It’s not that I didn’t occasionally dream of the comforts and security a husband could provide. Sometimes I was tired of having to always call the landlord myself, or wished someone else would fill the fridge with groceries, or that it wasn’t only up to me to build up an emergency savings fund. I understood the appeal of having a life partner and legal commitment that validated the relationship.

It is always how the relationship serves her

“Urban families,” on the other hand, were comprised of young, never-married city dwellers, both gay and straight, who relied on each other as if they were blood relatives.

“It’s great if people realize that there isn’t just one way to live,” Fielding has said. “That’s an old-fashioned concept, and I think it’s losing its grip on us. Life in cities is very similar all over the world, and people do tend to live in urban families as much as in nuclear ones. They’re not worse off or better off; the point is that it’s no longer abnormal to be single.”

“My friends have been there for me in such an emotionally supportive way across distance,” she says. “It’s kind of a dumb metric but I’m always aware of how many states have I hung out with this friend or that friend in. They’re there for me through whatever stress I have about trying to figure out my career and my life. I’ve always been really grateful for them being that sort of foundation for me.”

“Leslie’s fundamental belief was that optimism beats pessimism. That was the essence of who she was. She thought that it was better to be positive, to try and to hope and to believe, than to give up and say, ‘There’s nothing we can do. We’re screwed.’ She was a person who’s going to keep fighting as long as she had a breath in her body.”