Girlfriends are the real life partners. Let's hear it for girlfriends.
Would you choose a bear over a woman in the woods? Of course not. A love letter to the women who keep our lives together and remain stalwartly not creepy.
Last week I went to a reunion at my high school. The old school building is getting torn down to build a new one, so there was a big mega-reunion for anyone who has ever gone there to walk the halls one last time.
Before you cringe, let me tell you that unlike 99% of Americans, I kind of loved high school. This is not a how-much-I-hated-high school story. By some cosmic throw of the dice, my high school was actually a nice place where most of us got along pretty well and generally…liked each other?
But mostly, I loved high school because I loved my friends—by which I mean mainly my girlfriends.
My high school experience really was a throw of the dice, because I transferred from another district even though I knew almost no one. The reason that I transferred was because I was miserable at my middle school.
Today we would probably say that my middle school had a culture of mean girls, paired with a strong dose of toxic masculinity. Girls formed cliques that belittled each other, and boys funneled into either the jock-bro track or skater dude track, both of which, in the 90’s, came with a wide streak of substance abuse and sexism.
But all I knew when I was fifteen was that my heart filled with dread every day when the school bus turned the corner and Butler Middle School came into view, and that my mom had started using the word “depressed” when she talked about me.
The new high school I decided to try was fifteen minutes from my house and it wasn’t new; it was in an aging neighborhood that didn’t have enough kids anymore to fill its classrooms. It boasted good teachers and test scores and a funky, open-air architectural design that had been pioneered in California, but made no sense in my hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah, where it was winter seven months of the year.
No matter. It was a beacon to kids like me who needed a place to land. Skyline High opened its doors, and misfits came.
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The first several weeks of high school I came home and cried a lot just out of new-kid loneliness. But I sensed a different vibe right away. No one threatened to throw anyone else into a locker, or dunk their head in a toilet, and no one seemed to be doing drugs in the parking lot corners.
But most importantly to me, the girls seemed different. The cool kids and popular girls, even the ones that had gone to school together since elementary, were shiny and intimidating but they weren’t mean. They even seemed kind of approachable?
I wanted friends but was not necessarily good at making them. I decided that since I had made the leap to a new school, I would overcome my affected cool-girl angst and introversion and try. I would try to make friends—specifically, girlfriends. And I did. I tried.
After a couple of false starts, I made a new friend. One friend. Her name was Julie. Julie had a smart mouth and long legs that she showed off by wearing short shorts, and by rolling her socks down below her ankles. I made fun of her socks, and she made fun of me back, and I liked her immediately.
Unlike me, Julie was good at making friends. She introduced me to another friend, and then there were three of us. By the end of the school year I had a group of girlfriends—like, friends that were generally fun and nice*. I was ecstatic. I was relieved.
(*Mostly nice—there were some pranks that were played that involved snails— don’t ask. But we mostly bonded over sneaking out at night and drinking Coke Slurpees, not by belittling other people and doing lines of coke).
With a group of good girlfriends, I felt like I belonged. I felt safe. When I was fifteen and knew a group of girls had my back, I felt like all was right in the world and I could go anywhere or do anything.
There were a lot of things that I did that surprised me when I felt like I belonged. For one thing, I became a try hard. I tried out for the dance company, the debate team, the competitive drill team (basically another dance team). I ran for student body officer; I even did cheer one year.
(If you’ve seen the Wes Anderson film “Rushmore” I was low-key a Max Fisher of Skyline High School: a kid who was seemingly doing everything, with mixed degrees of success.)
I loved going to school when I was a teen, because I loved being with my girlfriends. And here’s the best part: We are STILL friends.
Even now that I’m well into my 40’s, I’m still friends with my high school girlfriends. We have an active group chat. We go on trips together sometimes. On the last one, one of them held my hair while I high-velocity vomited on a low-class cruise line.
I saw most of them last week at the reunion, and we drove around the old neighborhood late at night drinking Coke Slurpees and laughing like crazy.
Because we have been friends since we were fifteen, over the decades our friendship has outlasted a lot of other relationships. In high school, we were told that marriage would be the most important and long-lasting relationship in our lives: the “real” relationship that we would graduate to from our girlhood pals.
But I find that the women in my life are the ones that have been around the longest, and been the most reliable. Statistics bear this out. Female friendships generally outlast and outperform male romantic partners.
Of my nine high school girlfriends, only four remain married to their first husband or with the father of their children. This is slightly higher but generally in keeping with the national average, wherein half of first marriages end.
And increasingly women are initiating divorce to get out of bad relationships, citing “lack of commitment” and lack of equality as top factors. (Up to two-third of splits are now initiated by women according to ASA, especially college-educated women who have more financial options).
This is driven by several factors that can make male-female relationships less beneficial to women, including recent research that clearly shows that heterosexual marriage benefits men more than women. Even when women work outside the home, research shows women still do hours more of the housework and childcare, while married men enjoy more leisure time at their female partners’ expense.
And heterosexual relationships can be downright dangerous. Men abuse their female partners in the U.S. in startlingly high numbers—1 in 4 women report partner abuse.
This is statistically common and we don’t talk about it enough, and again, in keeping with the national average, it has been the case for more than one of my high school friends. One case was extreme enough that our girlfriend group pooled resources and money to help extract a friend from a dangerous and toxic situation.
There is a reason that women would overwhelmingly rather encounter a bear in the woods than a man. And there’s a reason that no one asks if a woman would rather meet a bear than a woman. Because of course they would rather meet a woman!
If I met a woman in the woods, worst case she’s a Karen, best case we become life-long friends.
If you gave me two women, we could probably take the bear and/or the dude. And that’s the point—women can be counted on when men can’t—to hold your hand, to take care of your kid, to not harass you, to not steal your time by expecting you to do housework or childcare or laundry for them.
Or just you know, generally not threatening or physically harming you, or being murder-y or rape-y. Which is a good basis for a lasting relationship.
As I wrote about recently, 1 in 4 women report abuse from their partners, and male-female partnership is a key driver of homicide: 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are women, per national statistics on domestic violence.
Which is, well, why a lot of women choose the bear. Or, actually in real life, why women rely on each other.
In fact, one of the reasons women are more likely to initiate divorce in a bad relationship is because women have more friends and support networks to lean on than men do, and even more so among college-educated women who formed strong networks in school. (When I left a one-sided marriage, an old friend from college literally held my hand through it and let me sleep on her futon until I could find housing. A childhood girlfriend drove from another state and moved me into my new place, with help from a handful of additional female friends.)
I’m happily re-partnered now, and so are some of my high school friends (one of them is even married to her high school sweetheart and they are adorable together, to be honest!) But some of the happiest years of my life have been surrounded by women.
After I made awesome friends in high school I got better at making friends, and I made a group of college girlfriends that I also still love like crazy and stay in touch with. And now I have a network of roommates and girlfriends spanning my life that have brought me laughs and joy and intimacy and safety and belonging.
Unsurprisingly, it’s well documented that strong and healthy social connections are crucial for adolescent girls’ wellbeing, but isn’t it obvious that they are essential for the wellbeing of grown women, too?
Sometimes I half-joke with my partner that if things don’t work out with us, I’m never getting married again and I’m just going to live with a bunch of women. And I really think I would.
It’s nothing personal, but with four-plus decades of proven girlfriends, there’s no man I could meet at this point that I would have known longer, or trust more, than the women in my life.
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Additional reading
"Get Married" wants you to believe that patriarchy will save you and civilization
The author of the new book “Get Married,” who is making rounds in the media right now, argues that the problems created by patriarchal capitalism—poverty, inequality, existential ennui—are best solved by, what else? Men. Marry a man and life falls into place, he argues. If not, face the consequences of financial ruin, unhappiness, and nothing less than civilizational collapse (hyperbole not mine; the phrase “save civilization” is actually in the book’s subtitle.) Another new book, by economist Melissa Kearney, makes a similar case.
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is an associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter
Instagram: @matriarchyreport
So true for me too. So many of the places I have loved — school, work, adventures — I have loved because of the dear true friends who were part of those places along with me. Shocking that patriarchy continues keep its boot on our necks, breaking us all apart.
I frequently reflect on the studies that show the key to a man’s mental health is close relationship to a woman/women. AND key to women’s mental health? Close female friendships. I’m equal parts annoyed (like must we do everything for everyone??) and heart warmed (aww women!) by this