My female friendships are based on my high school circle and reality shows

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/31/female-friendships-high-school-reality-shows

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Maybe it’s because I like watching adult women tear into each other like mean birds, but I find reality shows about toxic female friendships utterly delightful. It’s also likely that I enjoy those programs because I don’t have very many female friends of my own: when I moved away from my hometown at 17, I made friends with a gaggle of boys and it stayed that way. The women on these shows – sniping and arguing and hair-pulling – have become a placeholder for any feminine energy lacking in my life, and the feuding, self-involved women portrayed in them are my proxies as my real-life female friends dwindle. This is exactly as sad as it sounds.

A few years back, I lost the most significant female friendship I’ve ever had. (Saying “lost” sound so passive, as if she were the two different packs of birth control pills I have accidentally dropped down two different sewer grates in two different countries.) We had known each other for 17 years and, nearing year 18, she dumped me, recounting my many failures as a friend and as a person. I’ve never been divorced but often wonder if it’s the same feeling: being with someone all the time, as a unit, until one day you’re not. She was the closest I ever got to a sister, my best friend and the one link I had to all the other girlfriends I have lost over the years.

Losing her cut the final thread to a group of girls I’d known from elementary school to high school, all of whom I’d spoken with less and less in the years after we graduated. I now only hear from one of them now and then; she gives me updates on the rest. I’m vaguely connected, sure, but it’s not like it used to be when I was integrated in the group. No one calls anymore. No one checks in. No one pretends like having a catch-up lunch would be so delightful. We are, for the most part, strangers – a realization that made something in me come unhinged.

Since I fell out with that group nearly three years ago, I haven’t made very many female friends that stick. My instincts are now all wrong: there was something too devastating about losing all those girls, even the ones I didn’t know that well or particularly like, to bring myself to connect with women on any meaningful level. I allow myself to get close to someone and start to build a bridge with her, but after a few months, I start worrying that the other shoe will drop and she’ll find a reason to dislike me – or maybe, that I will dislike her. It’s some warped attempt at self-preservation, like I’m readying myself for an attack any second now. Soon, she will turn on me, I tell myself, and I will have no choice but to kill her.

Worse, sometimes I catch myself being unfair or cruel to the women trying to start friendships with me. I’ve become the most nefarious stereotype of a female friend, the one who gets competitive, jealous and mean for no reason. My sole understanding of female friendship comes from four teenagers, forever frozen in time as the girls I knew in high school, and women acting up for reality shows whose friendships are based almost exclusively on throwing white wine in each others’ faces.

I am trying to be kinder. Naomi, one of my newest female friends, has wormed her way through my life, dodging every attempt I’ve made to set her on fire. She sometimes treats me like a puppy who won’t stop biting, ignoring me when I want to start a fight and putting me in my place when I start to snarl. She sends me emails with subject lines like “hello my dear scootchers” and “are you feeling emotionally safe???” almost weekly, all with a startling sincerity that ordinarily makes me nervous. When she sees me get needlessly aggressive with another woman, she cocks her head and asks me with a guilelessness I’m not used to, “Are you feeling supported right now?”.

And, usually because of her, the answer is yes. It’s good for me, but I hate it, like a booster shot or all these dumb vegetables my doctor keeps talking about.

Still, there are days when I miss those high school girls, when I wish they missed me back, and when I think about contacting them to try to fix what’s broken. But it’s been years, and everyone is older and likely uninterested in rehashing old fights. So instead I try to find new reserves of kindness in me. I call Naomi, and I let her talk about plays and books and her feelings, and I’m reminded – because apparently I need reminding – that good people can love you. You just have to do the hard thing and love them back.