The Real Reason Female Friends Rule

Mara
Mara
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

I distinctly remember certain high school girlfriends bragging repeatedly about preferring dudes as friends because there was “no drama.” Of course this sounded cooler and more convincing than my naive teenage brain could argue—so for a second there, I totally agreed — like a meerkat watching for stupid truisms.

I mean, doesn’t everyone have at least one girlfriend who claims she prefers to be friends with dudes because <insert why-woman-are-bad reason #8763>?

Okay? We’re drama… women ruin friendships with their drama.

OR DO WE?

Maybe those too-cool-for-chicks chicks are afraid of the immense power of loving women like we’re supposed to love ourselves. Maybe they’re uncomfortable with how much another woman can understand them and see through their bravado to their insecurities. Because we do — we can sense what’s going on. We read non-verbal body communication very effectively. We hear the tone of your voice and we just know because all of our senses are evolved to tune into the emotional content of your communication.

The drama of being female is simply the human drama, really. We’re just paying closer attention to the actors and the stage, so it’s better if we’re honest from the get-go, instead of too-cool for each other.

And when women get honest with each other? Well, that’s when things get truly glorious.

Women who let down their social defenses (with or without alcohol) to share themselves honestly with their female friends feel the deep primal vibration—the strange soulful struggle to understand and empower oneself in this contradictory world that claims we’re (finally) free to fulfill our potential, but only as defined within our clearly still-male-dominated governments and cultures.

Women live with whirling cognitive dissonance everyday. Be sexy but not slutty. Be smart but not too loud about it. Be successful and creative but also be a hot little number and perfectly fit, because that’s also super-important. Be yourself but really only if you’re naturally beautiful, otherwise, it’s better to be waxed, perfumed and primped into your most perfect self — whatever TF THAT is.

What we try to ignore is the cost: the time, the money and the self-defeating cycle of energy trying to resolve the push-pull nature of our supposed freedom as females in the modern world.

Female friends know there’s something wrong with the way things work… we can’t always put a finger on it, but we feel it.

When we get together we feel it even more — it rises to the top. That’s why we bitch and bicker: the maddening nature of being female and pretending it’s all been realized and smoothed out into the balanced fair society where we and men truly respect each other as equal humans worthy of the same value and weight in society… that’s what we’ve been told we have. But we know it’s not really true. Underneath it all. We still know.

Woman-to-woman honesty and bitching is life. From menstrual blood to mucous plugs, stretch marks and pantie stains, it’s not nearly as pretty as it should be, it’s not quiet or tasteful, even, but it’s deep and rich and a helluva lot more vital and hilarious than prettiness and faux perfection can ever hope to be.

To know that our imperfections are not failings, but simply us existing as humans sharing the bizarre stretching societal expectations that none of us truly have the energy or moxie to encompass without the love of friends that know our struggle just as deeply as we do.

This is why female friends rule.

And this is why we’ve built Sisterhood — a new woman-only community. Get in on the ground floor: sisterhood.today

Mara

Written by

Mara

Runner • Existential detective • Breaker of things • Feminist • Armchair neuroscientist

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