The age old question, "Can men and women be friends?" seems obsolete to me. Every since Billy Crystal posed that it is impossible in "Harry Met Sally," it seems that male/female friendships have risen in popularity, almost setting out to prove his theory wrong. Over a decade later, I find myself with a good mixture of people that I'm closed to are both female and male. Though, I've also found the platonic relationships that are easier to maintain (even past the middle school, high school, even college bullshit), are the ones with my guy friends.
I have had a string of many unlucky friendships and others that have just drifted apart. The thing I love about my guy friendships is that they don’t get jealous, they don’t get catty, they don’t get pissed if you didn’t call them back right away (and you can’t get pissed at them—because they’re just guys). The best friendships are the ones that you can go weeks, or even months without talking to and pick up where you left off, like not a day has gone by. In fact, I have two female friends that just ended their relationship after being best friends for eight years just because they don’t call each other anymore. I wonder if they were guys, if this would make any difference.
The thing with girl friendships, it’s the same no matter what age you may be. Let me go back to my first failed girl-friendships. I remember playing with toys in my basement with Alison and Amanda before I remember learning how to talk. I also remember that Amanda made me cry almost every time I saw her. My mother recorded in my baby book that she hit me and grabbed toys right out of my hand. Some friend. Needless to say, that friendship didn't last much past elementary school. Alison and I remain friends after many rocky years and have grown apart. Though we are bound by our pact from age ten, when we vowed that no matter what, we would be at each other’s weddings one day.
Then in high school I met Sara. I kind of felt bad for her. She wasn’t the thinnest or prettiest girl and in fact, when I started hanging out with her, girls (like Amanda) would actually say to me, “How can you be friends with her? She’s so annoying.” Though, I saw a great friend in her and by the end of 10th grade, everyone saw what I saw. Even Amanda started befriending her. She loved to shop, talk on the phone for hours and was just as boy-crazy as I was. We would page each other “911” on each other’s beepers to call back immediately with the latest news about something that happened at school that day or about our latest crush.
Soon the “911”s became real emergencies, like the time I had to leave my date at another school’s dance to have my father pick up Sara and bring her to our house, since her step-dad and mother were fighting again. Soon her family troubles got more serious and she had to live at my house for a few months. Not only were we together all the time at school, but also we were forced to go home from school together and had no time away from each other.
I didn’t realize how bad it was getting until Sara stopped talking to me. My only communication with her was when I would walk into the classroom and she would whisper something to one of our friends and giggle, and then mutter something like, “Oh crap. I hope she didn’t hear us,” and giggle some more. Pretty soon I had to switch to another table during the first period of school. Then, upon confronting her, she handed me a nasty letter that said things like I need a “new personality” and she didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. It wasn’t a post-it, but I couldn’t believe she ended our friendship with a rule-lined note!
I spent my senior year of high school with various people from various groups: the popular, the older kids that didn’t go away to college, the bad kids, the chorus dorks, and even the ones that weren’t part of a group, valuing only the friendships I had made outside of high school (probably since those didn’t have a chance to talk about me behind my back) and a few childhood friends that I held onto. I guess you could say that the ending to the movie “Mean Girls” was sadly a metaphor for this time of my life.
My older sister told me that college would be different, that people would grow up and I would find more mature friendships. She was right—to an extent. I met my freshman year roommate, Jamie. I knew I didn’t want to be friends with her from the moment I saw her unpacking her car outside my dorm and I prayed that the snobby-looking girl was not my roommate, which of course she was. She started to grow on me and immediately befriended me. We spent our first day knocking on every door on every male co-ed’s floor in the dorm to neighborly introduce ourselves. We got invited to all of the parties together and even accepted a handful of girls and guys into our group, which then became inseparable. Jamie and I even decided to live together our sophomore year in an off-campus apartment, while the rest of our group split up among the dorms.
Just a few weeks before the end of our friendship, Jamie admitted to me I was her best friend at school. I had been there for her in ways I have never been for a friend before. I cried and sat by her side while I watched paramedics keep her conscious as she convulsed from mixing drugs and alcohol at a party. I defended her when rumors spread about that incident. I once checked on her every 30 minutes for an entire night just to make sure she was still breathing because she was found passed out from drinking (with her pants down after peeing in an alley). I held her hand every time she took a pregnancy test because she wasn’t sure if she had slept with a guy or used protection the night before.
I knew she had issues, including temper problems (like the time she picked a fight with me because I was talking to my then-boyfriend on the phone in our dorm room after she had recently broken up with her boyfriend), but nothing was going to prepare me for what was to come.
Like Sara, she began to avoid me. She spent more time at her boyfriend’s and my only form of communicating with her was to leave her a message on the computer for whenever she got back. I saw she had an away message up that she “couldn’t wait” until she moved back to campus next semester (something she didn’t inform me—her roommate—of. So when I called her out on it and asked what I was going to do the following semester if she left without much notice, she replied, “You are a selfish bitch. All you think about is yourself. I don’t want to ever talk to you again.” I'm not sure what I did to upset her exactly. To this day, our mutual friends will tell me that she would come to them complaining about me but had nothing to complain about other than she hated me. I kind of laughed off the whole thing because at this point, I realized that if someone didn’t see that I put everything into a friendship and it wasn’t reciprocated, it wasn’t worth it.
For some reason she then set out to be in a full-on war with me: slamming doors in our apartment, pushing me at parties, even drunkenly shouting that I was a c-u-n-t to our mutual friends at one party. I made it a point to not say a bad thing about her to our friends and let her display her rage for no reason, which blew up in her face, as she no longer remained friends with most of them.
A year later I ran into Jamie on campus, while on the way to a party with a couple my girlfriends. She looked me up and down and mumbled, “SLUT.” And as my friends laughed at her immaturity, I laughed inside, recalling the girl I once used to comfort after a night of drinking since she woke up with her clothes off, again.
My father always told me that my mother shared this trouble with female friendships; even until the day she passed away. People that were supposed to be her “friends” would talk about her behind her back and were not there for her when she was sick. My father said the main reason for this was jealousy. She was stunning, and 5’7”, very thin, had long blonde hair, blue eyes, with a dynamic personality, so often women faulted her for this. This is why she tended to befriend men.
Like her, I find that males aren’t as competitive in friendships. They can see a friendship for what it is and just enjoy another’s company. Some male-female friendships may start out with some attraction one way or another, yet most guys will remain a true friend to you when you need them most—or at least take you out for pizza or a drink to get your mind off of things.
Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of girl friends—some of which I have known since I could barely walk, and some I met in the past few years. Though there are those few girls that you can hold dear to your heart, that you know won’t get jealous or competitive, that won’t be catty, that won’t talk about you behind your back or call you names (no matter what age you are), that won’t get mad if you don’t call them for a month, that can just be there when you need to talk or cry. Because that’s what girl friends are for.
