The Importance of Female Friendships
As a newlywed, I moved to San Antonio. This was an exciting move, a chance to make it on our own. I left my St. Louis friends and family with a hopeful smile for an exciting adventure. One night early on, we went to dinner and I saw a table of about six girlfriends, laughing and talking. I suddenly had tears in my eyes watching them. I thought about going to introduce myself and trying to make friends with them. But then I realized that I missed MY friends. My girls. My laugh-until-you-cry or cry-until-you-laugh soul sisters. I wanted to walk up to their table and say “I have my girls too, they just aren’t here right now, but we are awesome!”
San Antonio didn’t feel like home until I made some true (life long, it turns out) friends.
It took being away from my girlfriends to make me appreciate how much they mean to me. How I defined myself by their opinion of me, which was always a far better opinion than I had of myself.
Female friendships are everything. Together we can handle absolutely anything.
I'm sure there are studies that support the idea that female friendships make our lives a million times better. But I'm just talking about my own experience, here.
When I look back on the history of my college group of girlfriends, it's pretty incredible. Together we've made it through college, graduate school, first jobs, engagement parties, weddings, babies, more babies, divorce (our parents and our own), military deployments, heartbreaks of every variety, infertility, some hard medical diagnosis, sickness, promotions, transitions to staying home, transitions going back to work, kids growing and changing, our parents getting older.
We've shared millions of phone calls, text messages, emails and even snail mail. I mean, we mailed each other monthly recipes for a while! We've shed sad tears, happy tears, laugh-so-hard you're crying tears. We've slept in single beds together in a sketchy youth hostel in Prague, and we've stayed in a fancy resort.
We've been there. We've kept each other safe. We've reminded each other that we are amazing. We've held the secrets and worries of the other so they can set them down for a while. We've gone years without talking (those little kid years can be brutal!) only to pick right back up when we get back together. We've called each other "out of the blue" only to find out someone is having a horrible day and really needed us. We've loved each other right through our best and worst days. We've jumped on planes to rescue the one who needed us - to build a crib for a surprise baby, to kidnap another for a much needed night out - including a new outfit so she could feel sassy.
My female friends are my secret weapon in life. No matter what happens, I know I can handle it. Thank you to my inner circle for being the best friends a girl could ever dream of. If you're lucky enough to have friends like this, remind them today how much you love them.
As Carrie Bradshaw once said “They say nothing lasts forever; dreams change, trends come and go, but friendships never go out of style."