The Endurance of Female Friendship

One day as I was scrolling through social media, I stumbled across a quote from an essay titled “The Girls are Never Supposed to End Up Together.” That specific quote actualized a thought that I’d harbored for many years about the state of female friendships as we grow up. Author Peyton Thomas writes, “The girls are never supposed to end up together. If there is a special girl in your life, you love her as a friend. You love her as a friend, but she becomes less important to you as you grow, and you leave her behind for a boy. She might even stand next to you when you marry the boy, and she might catch the bouquet of flowers that you throw to her. You’re giving her permission to move on, move away from you. It’s a ceremony of separation.”

I’ve always wondered why this is. Why do these important relationships slip away as though there was no core there? Why does there seem to be an almost imperceptible shift in the way friends interact after marriage? How do I, as someone who puts so much value and importance on my friendships, circumvent the idea that my friendships will never be the same after marriage? I turned to my sister for perspective, who has experienced this with a few friends already. Close friends from both high school and college have tied the knot, and one of her best friends is engaged. She told me, “Society views [marriage] as the pinnacle… everyone thinks that the holy grail is getting to marriage, so once they get to that everything else falls under a lower tier. In an ideal world, I think that you should be able to invest and build your marriage foundation successfully while also maintaining relationships that mattered to you — matter shouldn’t be past tense, if it’s past tense then you’ve missed the point.”

It seems so simple; you just have to be intentional and put in the time to continue to grow, not just maintain, the friendships that are important to you. However, I think the collective societal view that marriage makes you somehow elevated in life can be damaging to the bonds of friendship. Certainly you and your friend are now in different life stages, but that doesn’t mean that one life stage is more important or prestigious than the other. Both friends will still struggle; both friends will still have wins and losses and new memories to share. Being partnered doesn’t mean that you’ve graduated to couples-only friendship. On the flip side, the unmarried friend should still recognize the new commitments and navigation that marriage takes.

“Female friendships are forged in the fire.” These relationships likely are rooted in the shared experiences of the vulnerable years of our teens and twenties, where the whole world is changing around us; these friends are strength and stability. We need to cherish these friendships, no matter what life stage we’re in — these are the people that will be there forever, who won’t hesitate to love you and care for you. Let’s prize our female friendships just as much as we prize our romantic relationships.