Facing the Vulnerable Nature of Female Friendships

Our bonds aren’t always as strong as we think

I’ve been thinking about my friend Jane lately. I have picked up my phone to text her at least a dozen times, but I keep stopping myself. We haven’t spoken in over a year, except for a few quick messages of felicitation on holidays and birthdays.

Those messages seem out of place after the catastrophic fight we had two summers ago. I was her boss at the time, a job I had taken four years previously with a lot of reservation. I didn’t like the idea that after ten years of equality in our friendship, I was suddenly accepting a position that would put me above her.

I remember I told my boss if anything happened with Jane — if a conflict arose, or disciplinary action needed to be taken — I’d have to step aside and let her handle it. I didn’t want to do anything that would threaten my friendship.

So when Jane responded in anger after my colleague, Peter (also her boss), made a call she didn’t like, and my attempt to sort it out with her only pushed her into an act of blatant insubordination, I did what I had promised myself I would do: I stepped aside and asked my boss and Peter to take over.

I didn’t like the idea that after ten years of equality in our friendship, I was suddenly accepting a position that would put me above her.

I thought things were settled, but Jane didn’t speak to me for weeks. At the end-of-season party, she completely ignored me.

I was stunned. I thought our friendship was over, and worse, I couldn’t figure out why. What on earth had I done to make her treat me so poorly?

I was surprised when she seemed willing to talk about it on the phone after her seasonal position ended and we were no longer boss-and-employee. She said my inability to administer disciplinary action had made her lose all respect for me as a boss.

On the one hand, I was grateful for her feedback. I realized that maybe I had failed at this “strong female boss” assignment by prioritizing my friendship over protocol and appropriate action.

But I also felt that her assessment of me was incredibly harsh. To say she “lost all respect for me as a boss” seemed wildly unfair, considering everything I had improved, built, and achieved in my four years at that job.

Further, I couldn’t help but notice that she had never once apologized to me for the unprofessional, inappropriate behavior she had demonstrated that summer — and I am certain she would have apologized to a boss who didn’t happen to be an old friend.

In the time that has followed this incident, I’ve struggled to make sense of it. To figure out what I should do, if anything.

I don’t want to lose this friendship (assuming I haven’t lost it already). Friendships between women aren’t easy.

We tend to align ourselves with the people who are going through what we are going through, even if that means veering away from the friends who have known us the longest.

When I was in my twenties, my friends who were having babies started making their own groups that didn’t include me. I heard them say many times that women who don’t have children just “don’t get it.” They wanted to be with women who were in the trenches of motherhood alongside them.

I understood that. It made sense. But it was hard to watch this migration of women start to pull away from the trajectory of my life, like geese in formation, moving to another location away from me, gathering more and more members as our twenties turned into our thirties and I still hadn’t had children.

When your life doesn’t conform to the status quo, you learn a lot about social patterns. You learn what women bond over — marriage, babies, divorce. You end up a little bit on the fringe, watching these groups form and unform, members pulling together in commonality, one eventually dropping away when she and her husband split up, forming a new group of single moms, another dropping away when her child is diagnosed with a life-changing illness, a new group forming around her filled with moms going through something similar.

We tend to align ourselves with the people who are going through what we are going through, even if that means veering away from the friends who have known us the longest.

I have watched all of this from the sidelines, keeping a tenuous hold on my friendships, available when they have a pocket of time to catch up. We meet and talk and clutch at these threads of our past, hoping they will keep us connected for a little while longer. I caught the ones who ended their marriages at the same time my relationship ended, and we had a moment of strength and solidarity together until they found a new mate while I was still slowly processing my grief, in no hurry for a new relationship.

I notice how closely women hold on to their husbands, above all else. I get it. I did that once, too, and I’ll probably do it again someday, when I’m no longer single. But it has been hard for me, historically, to watch my friends slide into the envelope of their man, taking his name after marriage, literally changing their identity for the sake of the family they’ve just become. I remember how that felt…like they were just an arm’s length too far for me to reach.

In a way, friendships have become easier since I entered my 40s. The things that used to matter so much don’t really matter anymore. Friends who are my age have either finished raising their children or they don’t seem to care as much about only surrounding themselves with other mothers. My friends in their 30s are at such different places in their lives that merging into cliquey groups wouldn’t even be possible. My friends in their 20s see me as a mentor figure, and my older friends are laid back, open-minded, and just want to connect.

And yet, there’s still a challenge, albeit a totally new one, in all this diversity of life experiences and circumstances that we all have. People seem to come and go a lot quicker than they used to. A strong, deep friendship that earlier in my life would have unfolded over the course of a decade can now blossom, fruit, and whither in the space of ten months.

Even more interestingly, the women my age seem angrier. Impatient. Short on forgiveness. I understand this, being there, myself. Women like me, born in the late 70s are sick of putting up with shit. We’re tired of having to say yes when we want to say no. We’re watching the #MeToo movement in awe, wondering why the holy fuck couldn’t that have happened in our youth?

It makes for an interesting scene, so many of us traveling these familiar paths in our friendships, but stepping on the surfacing landmines of each other’s past traumas, deeply embedded frustrations, years of forced silence.

Suddenly, our anger and pain are causing unintentional damage. It’s creating a whole new dance, unpredictable and volatile. You never know when we might blow someone right out of the relationship.

A strong, deep friendship that earlier in my life would have unfolded over the course of a decade can now blossom, fruit, and whither in the space of ten months.

Is that what happened with Jane, I wonder? Looking back, I see the increasing anger she has expressed over the years — at me, at others, at life. Was this inevitable?

I don’t know the answer to that. In fact, after what happened, after my decision to prioritize our relationship brought us to this estrangement, it’s clear to me that I don’t really know anything about friendship, at all.

For all the platitudes we hear about friendships, we know, deep down, that these aren’t necessarily true. Friends don’t always have each other’s backs. Friendships don’t always last forever.

But we keep trying. We keep connecting, even across the gaps of our differences.

Maybe that’s all we can ask of each other. Maybe that’s enough.

© Yael Wolfe 2020