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March 15 - March 17, 2020
“I’ll never have a best friend who is a man. It just doesn’t work that way. So many times young girls will be like, ‘I’m a guy’s girl.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you’re not. There’s no way a man can understand you like a woman, and you’re a guy’s girl because you’re threatened by other women.’
No
One of the friends she missed was her best friend, Mary, whom she met in seventh grade, when they were twelve. In ninth grade, they dated the same guy. “We were both mad about this boy,” Blume says. Instead of ruining their friendship, it gave them more in common. “We’d talk on the phone, like after she was out with him, after I was out with him,” she says. “It was like, ‘How many times did he kiss you?’”
...what?!
In high school there were more kids to make friends with—three middle schools fed into the high school—and people were divided into clusters according to generalizations, like if they were band geeks, druggies, or ropers (the kids who wore Western wear and took agricultural classes).
I need someone to corroborate that “ropers” is a real thing.
Our general operating principle was that it’s fine, and expected, to knock other girls down.
If you look at it, it’s absurd to say that one whole group of people is anything. It’s sort of the hallmark of bias. The hallmark of prejudice is to say that any group is something negative.”
“My femininity is my white noise, the creaks and groans of the house that is my body.”
I was spending all my time doing what the writer Claire Vaye Watkins calls “watching boys do stuff.” “Nearly all of my life has been arranged around this activity,” she wrote in an essay for the literary magazine Tin House. I’ve filled my days doing this, spent all my free time and a great amount of time that was not free doing it. I’ve watched boys play the drums, guitar, sing, watched them play football, baseball, soccer, pool, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. I’ve watched them golf. Just the other day I watched them play a kind of sweaty, book-nerd version of basketball. I’ve
...more
But actually 😂
It’s not that I’m like other girls or not like other girls. I’m like me.”
“The thought of having to see someone every day, it stresses me out,”
Briallen’s doing what she can to solidify and sustain what could be ephemeral relationships, in part by creating rituals to protect them and signify how special they are to her. She tells her friends she loves them on a regular basis and lights a The Golden Girls votive candle at night when she’s counting her blessings.
Those are certainly two very different rituals...
But just because she wanted to develop a friendship with someone didn’t automatically mean they were interested too—sometimes figuring out if someone is into you as a friend is as awkward as discerning if a crush reciprocates your feelings.
But almost more so!
adult women are more likely to be asked if they have a boyfriend than a best friend and to wear an engagement ring instead of a BFF charm.
In The New York Times, Gayle said about Oprah, “Who doesn’t want to be her best friend? . . . I never feel I’m in her shadow. I feel I’m in her light, that’s how I look at it.”
A person is not just someone you drink too much wine with. A person is essential.
Alexandra thought that she and Melissa could have moved in together, been artificially inseminated by the same sperm donor, and raised their kids as siblings—a present-day version of the nineteenth-century Boston marriage.
....wat
“The shared experience of bonding over someone else’s lameness is the glue of female friendship,” Susanna says.
This seems antithetical to a lot of the points the author is trying to make about female friendship in this book.
It can hurt to break up with a friend just as much, if not more, than to break up with a lover, but women don’t grieve these losses as publicly.
It wasn’t that we never felt this support before, but now it was becoming acceptable conversation between all women and with men. I didn’t have to hunt for stories of women valuing each other or of women championing each other. We all knew what it was like to be alone, unprotected, and not taken seriously—and we weren’t holding back from talking about it. The hashtag that defined this outpouring, #metoo, was female friendship writ large on social media.
I feel like that’s an overly flowery way to describe the #metoo movement.
