Growing up, I thought becoming a woman would come with two guarantees: the romantic soulmate and the female best friend. As a teenager, I lived off a steady diet of romcoms and sitcoms, unconsciously absorbing a script for how adulthood would unfold. Obviously, I would work at a fashion magazine like Jenna in 13 Going on 30 and live in an impossibly large flat in an impossibly expensive city with five of my closest buddies, Friends-style. One day, a tall, mysterious man (looking suspiciously like Colin Firth) would confess he loves me just as I am. Until then, my close-knit group of besties would be available 24/7 to dissect the minutiae of my dating life and to hold my hand through all of life’s hurdles.
But as I navigated my 20s, cracks started to appear in my fantasy. My experience working in fashion was more The Devil Wears Prada than How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and my friendships and love life often felt closer to an anxiety-inducing episode of Girls than Sex and the City. However, one thing did happen: I found the guy.
I met my husband the lockdown way: dating apps and coffee walks. (Not exactly a romcom, although I did get locked inside a public toilet minutes before our first date, which surely qualifies as a modern meet-cute). Two years later, he proposed in that same spot (the beach, not the toilet), and it genuinely felt like a movie. Now we’re married and happy: both lifting each other up and figuring out adulthood together. And with that, I achieved half of that teenage dream.
It was when we started wedding planning that I began to feel the gnawing absence of my mythical best friend. While I was engaged, the longing for a ride-or-die female friend intensified: if I had one, I kept telling myself, she would plan a hen party packed with inside jokes and teary speeches, or post a heartfelt Instagram tribute documenting decades of friendship. She would, after two Aperol Spritzes, refer to me in front of everyone as ‘a sister.’ I felt that, by not having a BFF, I had failed at one of the central requirements of womanhood. I had never found ‘the (platonic) one,’ and I worried that people would label me with the worst title of all: not a girl’s girl.
“I think many women carry a quiet sense of shame about their friendships,” says Dr Claire Stubbs, chartered psychologist and author. We’ve been sold a very specific image of what adult friendship should look like—whether that’s the four inseparable women in Sex and the City, the friendship group in Friends, or the carefully curated social media posts we see every day. The message is often that if you’re successful, happy, and emotionally healthy, you’ll naturally have a tight-knit group of best friends around you.”
The reality, she says, is often much messier.
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