The Sprout

Female friends: You wouldn’t wish them on your worst enemy right?

Postiwyd gan archifCLICarchive o Cenedlaethol - Cyhoeddwyd ar 27/10/2009 am 10:46
1 sylwadau » - Tagiwyd fel Ysgrifennu Creadigol, Pobl

• Tweet

Yn Gymraeg

Female friendship these days is a tiresome business right?  Unlike male friendship, the female variety has to be nurtured and cultivated like a delicate but hugely unpredictable flower.  Regular phone call updates are required as well as constant reassurance and a knack at appearing to care about every tiny problem encountered by someone else. Frankly it’s exhausting.

Surely our mothers were never so self-indulgent?  Unlike the friendships our mothers might have enjoyed, a quick gossip over the garden wall “Mrs Ellis has really let the carnations go this year”, a jaunt down to the Womens Institute “oh it’s naked calendar week” and if there’s time, a nice cuppa and maybe a bit of knitting, things aren’t quite so blissfully simple these days.  Female friendship has turned into some sort of weird emotional investment with the emphasis on getting the maximum return for our money.

Girls, once the pillars of sanity in a mad world have turned into crazed, emotional vampires sucking the energy out of everything with their endless petty problems, worries, weight concerns and man troubles.  If you’re thinking ‘I don’t have any friends like that’, then chances are it’s you.  Friendship, once a simple meeting of minds has turned into an art form with females seem to amass a friend portfolio of carefully selected individuals, in order to create a tailor-made support network, involving friends in every aspect of their lives. “Now shall I ring Stacey to moan about my career as she always flunks interviews or Nicola to vent about my commitment phobic boyfriend as all her boyfriends have been a bit crap so she will know exactly what I am going through”.

And so this network of friends is called upon no matter how big or small the crisis, what shoes to buy, what kind of probiotic to drink, whether size zero is achievable in 4 weeks, wet look leggings - a fashion crime?  And my personal favourite “what are you wearing to the party” 12 hours in advance, but lets face it girls, it’s nearly always about men. “Steven says he is working late at the office, do you think he’s with another woman?” confides your friend.  

How on earth do you respond to this?  The truth maybe?  No amateur, are you insane?  Girls don’t want the truth; girls want ego stroking, reassurance and downright lies. “Steve, no he would never leave you, well not again anyway, not after what happened with the secretary and the photocopier, he almost got fired”.  Knowing full well that ‘Steve’ is about as trustworthy as an estate agent (a generalisation based upon the one I met recently - that "quirky, efficient and compact space" was a cupboard), you still smile and lie through gritted teeth because you know honesty is about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit.  So this means week after week you feign interest as your friend puts on her brave Princess Diana face and announces through streaming tears and snot that this is “definitely his final chance”, forgetting that he has already had 27 final chances and you stopped caring after the first 2.

Take two of my friends, lets call them friend A and friend B, lest they read this article and murder me in my sleep.  Friend A comes to be for advice concerning evil boyfriend.  Evil boyfriend has been exposed as a cheat but has concocted a fantasy world so lucid it could be adapted into a Terry Gilliam movie, the gist of it being that he is the innocent, brave victim of an obsessive stalker, who has a borderline personality disorder that caused her to break and enter into his bedroom without his consent.  What do I think?

Friend B rushes in all cooing and sympathies “of course he’s telling the truth, He simply adores you, what a psycho that girl must be.”  What I honestly think does not even come into it now, as clearly we’ve decided to take a break from reality for the time being.  Friend A has already decided to believe evil boyfriend and not dump the swine, my job is to reassure her it’s absolutely the right decision, except I am not capable of this kind of phenomenal level of disneyland fantasy and excuse myself to get a much needed drink from the bar to escape the madness.

Now I can just about deal with the emotional offloading, but not the tedium of daily declarations of eternal friendship. There seems to be some bizarre notion that in order to validate female friendship you are required to proclaim undying love and devotion to each other (this is usually prompted after several glasses of chardonnay cue the drunken texts).

Before you were only supposed to text your boyfriend embarrassing 160 character declarations of adoration at 4am, “ur my w0rld, I fink ur the be5t thing eva, I loooooove u”, now you get them from girls!  Friends A+B are guilty of the late night love texts, and sometimes even the 8am texts, enthusing “love you” at the end of every one.  What?  Of course you don’t love me, not only am I a miserable, cynical, caffeine addicted, emotionally stunted, nightmare of a person, love is a highly complex emotion that should be best expressed intimately to a partner of your choice and not banded around like some sort of meaningless email sign off.

Of course if you don’t respond as enthusiastically you then inevitably get 12 messages in succession, ‘What’s wrong?  Have I done something wrong?’ Are you ok?  Why haven’t you replied?’ ‘Is it because I’ve lost weight and you haven’t?’ etc.  At this point I have smashed my phone in an exasperated rage.  

As I am completely emotionally redundant, all I want is to have simple uncomplicated friendships that aren’t quite so high maintenance. Believe it or not I actually like my friends, I just don’t want to talk about my weird rash, or my feelings or my bowel movements. There are clearly rules to this friendship game that I just don’t understand or am too stupid to comprehend, so until then I’ll have to live with the 2am hysterical phone updates of “He’s leaving me, I don’t understand why is he’s leaving me?  I only went through his emails twice and hacked his Facebook?  Why has he gone? What do you think?” 

Er, what do I think?  Well.

For further information on friendships click here

• Tweet