She can call me at 11:30 at night on a work day, wake me up and vent about jcrew.com running out of her size in the most beautiful camel colored coat. She leaves voicemails on my cellphone about something she noticed outside her classroom building and think out loud, while I listen miles away with a smile on my face.
She whispers to me in between the halls about the cute guy that was just hired at work.
She goes on and on about her toothache, her prank phone calls that wake her up at night or her heel that broke on her favorite pair of boots.
She shares her goals, her aspirations, her worries and thoughts, her laughs and cries, her strengths and weakness with me, and I do the same.
She also irritates me when we disagree. She also gets bothered when all I do is complain. She bugs me when she doesn’t call me back.
This isn’t just one woman, it is a number of women that are in my life that I respect, and admire. I call when I have nothing to say except to vent about the perfect pair of Mary Janes that were not available in my size and that was the highlight of my day.
No, you are not reading a sappy ode to some bad version of “Beaches.” Sure, these women may be the wind beneath my wings, but they can also be the thorns in my side. Like most friendships between women, a friend can become a foe in a quick toss of the hair. On the other hand, those same women enlighten us. They give us different eyes to see the world. That is the complexity of women’s friendships.
In “I Know Just What You Mean” by Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman and her best friend, journalist Patricia O’Brien, the power of friendship in women’s lives is discussed and analyzed through personal accounts of real friendships between women and the authors’ own experiences. Women’s friendships are necessary and important in a young girl’s life.
Without each other, women lack a component that makes them whole, as Goodman and O’Brien point out. Near or far, a woman’s ability to maintain a friendship in today’s busy life through emails, coffee talk or long-winded voice mails on cellphones is pretty outstanding.
As Goodman and O’Brien put it, women put shared interests highest among the reasons they bond with a friend. While women first want friends who share their values, men bond with groups by painting a house or playing a game of football; they feel as though they have bonded and their buddy for life would always be there to bring another case of beer around. But that is not how women work. Do they have it all right and we have it all wrong? Do they have the secret to friendship while we overanalyze and discuss things to death?
Deborah Tannen, author of “You Just Don’t Understand,” says “for grown women, the essence of friendship is talk, telling each other what they’re thinking and feeling and what happened that day: who was at the bus stop, who called, what they said, how that made them feel.”
We can be competitive and encouraging, friendly and catty, uplifting and selfish. Our friendships focus on issues that are important to us and more often times than not, we are the extra shoulders to lean on. We listen and talk back. We may occasionally ramble on about shoes and hair (“how do you straighten your’s and do you use Frizz Ease?”) But we bond.
There is of course the ultimate test of friendship each woman goes through. It’s called “the Goldilocks test of shopping.” Have a friend that contemplates every purchase until day’s end? Cancel them out of your “friends I shop with list.” Have a friend that doesn’t take her time and let you look around? Check her off. Have a friend that takes her time, takes a moment to look and ask you for advice, and tells you that those jeans you’ve tried on are not doing anything for you?
Circle her with a red pen and never let her go. She fits just right.
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