Girl Talk

I haven't had a meaningful conversation with a girl in probably the last ten years that didn't include some variation of "I don't really get along with girls very well" followed by a multitude of reasons why girls suck.  How is this possible?  None of us like girls but most of us have a best friend.  We openly state how catty and bitchy girls are yet we've ALL taken strides to avoid spending time with certain women (often to the extent of excluding them which almost always creates hurt feelings).  


I've come to the conclusion that much like the mother-daughter relationship, the chick-chick relationship is special, convoluted, and complicated.  


Inexplicably, there is nothing like having a really great female friend.  I don't know if I can explain it other than postulating that perhaps it's an aligning of the uteri or a magical estrogenic e-harmony match.  Amazing bonds can exist between women.  Whether it's the brutal honesty of "No, I don't really care for that on you", the validation of "My partner does the SAME thing and I ALSO want to stab him/her in the eye" or the fairy-tales of ice cream having no calories because it's Girls' Night, it's an intensely intimate kinship that can be fulfilling and rewarding or exhausting and destructive.


So how is it that things go sideways so often?  Why are we not more careful with how we handle these precious and sacred relationships?  


I think ultimately, the ties that bind us are the same ties that tear us apart.  We tend to be insecure and emotional creatures.  It's easy to invent reasons that a girlfriend no longer likes us.  It's easy to decide that she's jealous of us because why ELSE would she have done that?  It's easy to assume rather than check things out.  And to be fair, we're a terribly codependent gender which means that frank conversations can't happen all that often because feelings are bound to be hurt.  And that's bad.  We learned long ago that hurting other peoples' feelings is bad.  Unless we're talking about Susie.  She deserved it.  That bitch.  


It's incredibly important to us to belong.  And in order to belong, one must also exclude.  If you've had any semblance of a normal childhood, you've undoubtedly experienced eating lunch by yourself, realizing that you weren't invited to the pajama party, and receiving hateful notes from the girl who was your best friend yesterday.    


It's all ridiculously confusing and is probably what leads most of us to swear off women.  It's too much trouble.  Too much drama.  Too much heartache.  And then you meet someone who shares your love of organizing, pedicures, and HGTV and tick, tick, tick...  there you are again.  Usually, there's a conscious decision involved.  If I let this person get close to me, how much damage can she do?  Is the risk worth it?  Will she be my pretend-girlfriend when the gross boy hits on me?  Will she tuck my nipple back in my shirt before the bartender can get a picture?  


I personally dislike the grey area that tends to accompany female relationships.  It's that weird, in-between space of not really knowing where you stand.  I have often wished that there could be concrete closure to the end of a friendship.  Rather than screaming at the top of your lungs "YOU ARE SUCH AN UNGRATEFUL WHORE AND I HOPE YOU GET NIPPLE CANCER" or simply never speaking again, one could say "I don't think our friendship is working out anymore and I don't wish to continue being friends with you."  Would it suck to receive that?  Sure.  But at least you know.  There are no questions.  There is no ambiguity.  There is no wondering "Are we, or aren't we?"  And you have a clear-cut point of when to start lighting your pictures on fire.


Of course, fickle creatures that we are, it's entirely possible that after such a conversation, we'd call our next best friend and talk about what a cunt Jenny is.  Who sends an email like that?  


So I guess there's no winning here.  We want to have our cake and eat it too.  The upside is that we can eat as much as we want because it's Girls' Night and there are no calories...