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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Women no longer become adults within the context of marriage -- we grow up with our friends. So what happens when they leave us?
Oct 4, 2004 | A move, a new job, the beginning or end of a relationship: These are among the traumas -- up there with birth and death -- that we're told are sure to send shockwaves through our systems. My friend Sara is about to face a daunting combination of them; she's quit her magazine job, packed up her beloved apartment, and on Saturday will leave New York, her home of six years, to move in with her boyfriend in Boston.
But my experience doesn't get much ink in either the self-help or greeting card aisles at Barnes & Noble. My best friend is moving away.
The power of female friendship is widely dramatized and almost as frequently fetishized in fiction. From Marianne and Elinor Dashwood to Nicole Holofcener movies to recent ads for Ortho Tri-Cyclen birth control pills to a certain high-heeled HBO series, yarns about women's abiding affection for one another -- especially in tart contrast to their relationships with men -- have been knit into yards and yards of narrative melodrama. But as mating patterns change, and many women put off marriage until their 30s, we gain a decade of independence; a decade that might once have been dedicated to bonding with husbands and children, but is now often unfettered by men or the limitations of family. We may be single, but rarely do we spend those years without a coterie of girlfriends. We may not be growing up within the context of our marriages anymore, but we are not alone. Women become each other's de facto spouses: We practice habits of sharing and intimacy; we urge each other to be stronger and sharper, to get better jobs, and to accept no less than just and healthy relationships.
Perhaps the books and cards don't address the commitments of women to each other because we are still catching up with our own changing clocks. Maybe it's that an honest acknowledgement of the role we play for each other might threateningly suggest yet another way in which men have become dispensable. For whatever reason, we don't have social mechanisms in place to convey the power of our devotion, or express our pain at its loss.
When Sara and I met, in our early 20s, as peons at the same magazine, we weren't crazy about each other. She thought I was snotty; she struck me as an emotional train wreck. We stayed in vague, uninterested touch through mutual friends as we got other jobs and each had a series of relationships, until at a friend's birthday party, three years after we'd met, we began comparing notes on our recently broken hearts. The girl I'd remembered as a delicate, weepy flower gave relentlessly hard-ass advice; she didn't think I was such a bitch anymore. Sara and I became friends.
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