Girl, so confusing

I think I love you but I just might hate you

I suppose it comes with the territory when you’re watching Gossip Girl and listening to Girl, so confusing on repeat, but I’ve been thinking a lot about female friendships, and the nuances that they often involve. I find them to be either the most confusing or the most validating of relationships, a dichotomy that twists on my tongue and makes it hard to explain just what a friendship is, was, or could be.

The first real memory I have of friendship is primary school: sitting in my friend’s kitchen making little Play-Doh models on foil trays and laughing until our stomachs hurt. It was easy and light and there was no hidden code or ulterior motive; we were young. That’s the last time I remember a friendship that I understood. The truth was served on those same foil trays and I swallowed it whole.

Then, secondary school rolled around. Being a shy 11-year-old beginning at an all girls’ school was really something, and I had never felt so lost. I bounced around friendship groups for probably the first year, telling jokes that didn’t even sound like me, chopping and pasting pieces of the people I thought I admired until I was a patchwork girl who couldn’t see herself in the mirror.

I found myself a best friend, my twin. So much so that we were known as one person, with our form tutor asking for ‘frelivia’ because where one went, the other followed. Even into the depths of self-estrangement. One lunchtime, over slushies and cheese paninis, our hair was braided together, brown locks that intertwined and matched so well it was hard to see where I ended and she began. We decided to stumble around the school with our heads fused together in this way. In hindsight, we both should have realised how difficult it was for us to move when were were tied together.

As often happens with friendships so intense, it crashed and burned, leaving us to sit together in the back of the GCSE maths classroom and awkwardly catch up on the surface details of our lives, the lives we once shared. Anything was better than the quadratic formula, though.

A Levels rolled around, and new friendships formed. The kind that you swear are forever but really only last a few years, just enough to avoid eating lunch alone and having no one to pair up with. The kind where one tells the other ‘she’ll never last at university’ but you do it anyway because you’re nothing if not bitter. The kind of friends you have on bereal; you see them every day, but you haven’t spoken for years.

There’s a special characteristic that sometimes comes with female friendships, a thread wound so tightly that I’m sitting here trying to unravel it on the screen of my laptop, and the knot is so big I can’t see it clearly. Girl friendships can be weird.

There’s a sense of competition sometimes, the kind of friend that grimaces when you celebrate an achievement, the kind of reaction that makes your stomach sink and you find yourself almost embarrassed. It feels like everyone around me has had the kind of friendship where you’re honestly not sure if they hate you, and if they do, why won’t they let you go either? Do you keep me close because you love me or because you can clip my wings from here?

I can’t stand you, but I’d be lost without you.

I don’t think it’s really our fault that we don’t always know how to be friends. The commodification of friendship and the resulting fallout is something that has always stood out to me. The common phrase ‘trios never work’ might ring true for some, but why is that the phrase that floods the comments of a tiktok featuring a trio of friends having fun? Girl-on-girl bitterness seems rife, especially when I compare it to the male friendships I see in my brother and his group.

Sometimes I still wonder if I even know what a friend is, or what they should be. Are you better friends with the girl who sends you daily Snapchats of her face or the one you rarely speak to but sends you heartfelt messages about your writing? Is there a difference?

I’ve seen a lot of discourse online about friendships, and how different friends serve different purposes, and I understand it, but to what extent? Do I want a friend that serves the role of keeping up a Snapchat streak? Is the idea of friendship genres just another way to group women, and typecast them into ways they serve us instead of ways we love them?

I spent a lot of my teenagehood wondering what was wrong with me, asking myself why I changed friends so often, unsatisfied with the surface level of support that makes your face ache from fake smiling for so long and leaves a sour taste in your mouth when you get home from school and wonder if you’re overthinking things.

It’s only in the past two years that I’ve really come to understand what friendship is for me, and realise that, despite my fears, maybe there’s not something innately wrong with me that deters people. Maybe I just hadn’t found the right people yet.

"She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it."

The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer

The right people support your every endeavour, and you do it back. I will never run unless something’s chasing me, but I’ve got Strava on my phone to give my best friend’s run all the kudos in the world because she deserves it. Likewise, she was my first subscriber on Substack, despite having never heard of it before.

The right people buy you a jar of fig jam to celebrate your substack blog and the name you’ve called it; they send you voice notes of their day because even though they’re a 9 to 5 adult now, they make time for their friends. You hang on their every word.

The right people book flights to visit you on your study abroad, and you can tell when they’re there to see you, not to have a holiday.

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Yesterday, I sent my friend a message that honestly makes me giggle to look at now, but in the moment, it had me crying.

I’ve spent countless months talking with my friends whose parents met at uni, or who know someone whose parents met at uni, and I suppose I’ve been thinking about it more than I realised. The quest for a love story that falls into place in the library of your university is something that’s looking less and less likely for me, a whirlwind romance that sets me up for life.

Sometimes that fear rears its head. The idea that maybe, as in friendships, I’m a special genre of unloveable that will leave me always yearning and never feeling. It’s silly, really, to worry that I might never be loved for who I am when I already feel so much love in my friends. The ones who know me, the dark corners of myself that I shed light on sitting on a bench at midnight, and they still stay.

I might not meet the love of my life at university, but I think I’m content with knowing that finally, friendships are becoming easy again. They’re filled with love and reassurance instead of the bitterness that comes with being a teenage girl with no love for herself.

It seems a running theme on my blog that despite it all, I feel the same as I did at 10 years old, but this is the case once again. I’ve graduated from play-doh models and making perfume in the garden, instead exchanging voice notes and every little thought I have, from my deepest insecurities to the new ring I bought. That same simplicity is there, though. I know who I am and where I stand, my feet firmly on the ground and my heart in their hands.

As Rachel Green once said, “I’ve got my girls.”