017: The Friendship Paradox
The celebration of female friendship is a cornerstone trope of millennial and Gen-Z media. Has it finally become grating?
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For our first conversation in this snazzy new format, we’re discussing female friendship in the cultural imagination. Which seems to be everywhere?! We have non-fiction books helping us navigate it (Friendaholic, Just Friends), TV shows where friends are family (SATC, The Bold Type also… Friends, duh), and a slew of coming-of-age films where the female leads, in search of romantic love, rediscover the transcendent nature of friendship instead (Ladybird, Booksmart, Bottoms). Yes, this is an obvious improvement from the traditional way that friendship was framed in the cultural canon — taking a back seat to heteronormative romance — and individually we love all these pieces of culture… so why is it that together, all this female friendship talk is starting to annoy us?
We’ve got weigh-ins from Elizabeth Day, a guy that Diana friend-fired in a very abrupt manner, and Aristotle… let’s dive in!
Divya: When we first started thinking about this, I was worried that we were both just being contrarian in a predictable way. Like, this idea is getting really popular now, and it’s feeling a bit passé, so let’s decide that we don’t like it. (One of my personal pet peeves with myself! Here I am admitting it!) But, upon reflection, I think it’s really more than that.
Diana: Yes. After mulling over it, I think I can finally pinpoint why it’s been bothering me: I think it’s that when we constantly reinforce the importance of friendship in women’s lives, it almost gets to the point where our conception of being a woman is inextricable from being a ‘good’ friend. And I’m not sure that’s serving us!
And this isn’t about specific pieces of art. It’s more like, when the dominant cultural narrative of womanhood is that women have this unique gift for creating deep emotional connections with each other, it coalesces into a pressure that’s… untenable. Like, I’d say the arc of my twenties (and the arc for so many of my female friends) has been learning that I don’t have to be a friend to everyone, that I don’t owe my time to anyone who wants a piece of it. I had to unpick the idea that my success as a woman, as a person, was dependent on how many lasting emotional connections I could sustain.
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