I have female friends of whom I think very fondly, whom I hold dear. I enjoy them because they send me emails about medieval history. I enjoy them because they send me links to CakeWrecks and come over to my house to hang with me when I can’t go about the countryside the way I used to before I became the me I am now. I enjoy them because they remember the days when we named our fetal pig ‘General Math’ after our most hated class. I enjoy them because they remember driving home in the spring sun with Amy Grant cranked loudly. Angels were indeed watching over us.
I still don’t understand the concept of Girlfriends. That female friend whom you call every day no matter what. The woman whom you’d spend more time with than your spouse if you could. The person whose home you go to in the afternoon and whom you then text all evening. The person whose legs you shave, and who shaves your legs for you. (I am not exaggerating. I’ve seen it happen.)
Every now and again one of my female friends or acquaintances will fall into one of these Boon Companion relationships, and I always feel wrong-footed by it. It strikes me not as bad or wrong but as so wholly unfamiliar that I can’t really fathom it. It’s odd, because I can fathom lesbians and lesbianism. I understand that. But this sort of halfway, where they’re both married to men and yet married to one another in an emotional sense is something I’m trying to wrap my mind around.
My sister has two co-workers who are in one of these relationships. When one transferred to a different department, the other spent days in serious despair to the point where the rest of the team thought she might need a sedative. She eventually contrived to have their boss move her to the other department along with her Girlfriend. Now they’re having a joint baby shower because they contrived to get pregnant together.
I don’t get it. Perhaps it’s one of the side-effects of my personality. I’m introverted anyway, and more analytical than some. I’m not terribly comfortable with signs of affection with anyone other than my spouse. So I guess it’s just not on the cards for me to get that kind of relationship.
Funnily enough, I did have that kind of relationship at one point in my life. I met Jacqui at the end of 5th grade and up through 7th grade we were inseparable (except that she was a year ahead of me.) Literally inseperable. We loved Star Wars and D&D and wrote our own role-playing game. We spent hours watching Dr. Who and she kindly put up with my infatuation with Tom Baker. Every Friday night we went to the mall. Every Saturday we went to the Library or to the movies. Years later she announced that she was transgendered and changed her name. So I suppose in retrospect I can’t count it as a Girlfriend relationship at all.
If you ever try to shave my legs, I will stab you.
These relationships sound to me like people who aren’t getting emotionally in other venues what they end up getting here. I have a group of good female friends; we don’t shave each other.
No one gets near my legs unless they have a wedding ring for me or a medical degree hanging on the wall. Period. End of story.
When I saw it happen I was just…
It seriously made me question my will to continue existing.
Where were you that you *saw* that?! Just… I’m a little nauseous now. There will be a poll and discussion tonight in the Corner of Wrongness. These answers should be incredible.
In a dorm at college.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
They probably *were* lesbians. At least I hope they were.
Tonight is Tuesday. Are you in the CoW on Tuesday too??
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Sorry.. I meant Thursday. I need a life. I don’t ever know what day it is anymore.
It takes a true friend to put compression stockings on you (unshaven, btw) after you have a c-section. I have such a friend and consider myself blessed.
Sometimes you don’t have a choice but to accept help. It’s definitely humbling.
Okay. Maybe I’ll cut some slack for the whole “having a baby” thing. Because I do believe in Midwives, Doulas, friend birth coaches, etc. That’s kind of different than “let’s spend all day together and then meet up for dinner after we stop back at the house and make sure our husbands finished their to-do lists.”
I’m thinking the difference maybe a true friend WILL do anything for you, whereas a “girlfriend” (in this context) WANTS to do everything for/with you.
I have a friend who has MS, and she and another friend were on a trip when her hands started not playing nice. This was before her diagnosis. For the rest of the weekend, any time she needed to take her bra off or put it on, she’d call our other friend over to hook it for her. I’d help a friend after a c-section, or a surgery, or whatever else.
The difference is that there’s a medical reason and a need to do it. If you’re perfectly capable of shaving your legs, having another friend of any gender do it for you is just odd. I can guarantee you I wouldn’t help a friend for no good reason.
Um. I’ve been reading your blog here for several years now. I’m a fan.
And… uh. Is it just me, or has this one wandered into one of the strangest places, like, ever?
I feel like somebody who rides the bus home, and takes the same route every day, and always gets off at the same stop. And today, I got off at that stop, and found myself lost in a strange place.
I’m not complaining or anything, mind you. I’m just saying.
I have a wife, so I could probably ask her about this stuff. But… really, I’m not even sure how I would bring the subject up.
It kind of did sort of go to a little zone of uberweird, didn’t it?!?
I’ll try to come up with something more my usual for today. Note the word:try. And also, Yoda can bite me.
I’m no good at the “Girlfriend” thing either. I don’t get the calling and texting and stuff. Maybe you have to be an extrovert to understand.
There may be truth to this. I’m an extrovert and I can envision a conversation where someone compares shaving to French braiding–”I can only do it on myself!” and then her friend says, “Let’s find out!” and it’s nothing more than a silly experiment. Because silly experiments are silly.
And, yeah, this discussion has gone to a weird place. Haha! I love your readers.
I doubt I could tolerate this kind of friendship, but, on the other hand, I sort of envy people who can tolerate closeness. They are probably healthier, body and soul, than I am. At a certain point, it doesn’t pay to be a curmudgeon.
I don’t know about that. I know more of these seemingly happy folk who’ve imploded after while when they couldn’t pretend things were ok anymore. At least as a curmudgeonly sort I’m fairly aware of the realities of my situation.
Pardon the brevity and the typos.This was sent from my iPhone.
Back before my hands went blooey, I used to give good massages. To my girlfriends, and also to boyfriends. I liked getting massages, too. Including from girlfriends. I can report that the physical contact had different sorts of zing, depending on who else was involved. I can further report that these days, when I get the occasional professional massage, I would not confuse getting a massage from a trained masseur with getting one from my husband. So I don’t think I share the shock! at straight women enjoying doing things together that may involve touching.
That said, my first reaction was that I wouldn’t want anyone but me to shave my legs, on account of the potential for cuts and all. But then I thought of men going to barbers for professional shaves, which in our culture they used to do a lot, though not so much in the past generation. And I have to say that it always seemed like a nice pampering experience. And I can sort of imagine women trying to replicate that through leg-shaving. Let’s face it, some people (cough, me, cough) just enjoy being touched, in ways that don’t have to be the least bit sexual.
So some of this stuff makes sense to me. I figure there’s a continuum of how much time and emotional energy any given person wants to (ex)spend with friends, and with spouses. Or, more likely, two different but interrelated continua. And some people just aren’t at the same places along them that I am. But even you, Coble, have been known to leave your husband behind to spend some time with your gfs.
I may not have explained myself well enough. It isn’t the touching. It isn’t the not being with one’s husband every minute of one’s free time. (Ugh. How stifling and Jr. High.) It’s sort of all of those things together that overwhelm me. It IS very hard to explain because if I give a laundry list of examples then one can go down the list and say “well, point A makes sense because of” and “point C is understandable when viewed like so”.
But the laundry list isn’t the point as much as the point is the sum total of all those things together.
Oh, I completely get you on the totality of it, if you really know some (or any) women who demonstrate the totality. I was thinking more along the lines of “some women do A, and some do B, and so on.” Which, I dunno, I think I know women who do touchy stuff, and women who go on week-long vacations with other women instead of the men in their respective lives, and most of the rest of the things you mention. (Though not the incredibly-close-friends-at-work thing. But I’ve heard a couple of men refer to a “work wife,” which may be the same sort of thing across gender lines. Which is to say that I believe it happens, I just don’t know anyone who has a friendship like that.) But I don’t know any single person who does all those things. I would also scratch my head a lot about someone like that.