My earliest memories of friendship all involve women. Perhaps it’s because I went to an all-girls school or all my family friends my age were girls – women were always at the core of my relationships.
When I was sixteen, a couple of nasty fights broke out between the girls in my grade. Subsequently, a series of seminars occurred about “how to be a friend” and “talking with your mouth and not your fists”. A teacher presented us with an article titled ‘It’s so much easier for me to be friends with guys and I’m okay with it’. To this day, I recall the absolute chaos and disarray within those four walls. Everyone objected to the points that the author made: Boys were “drama-free” and yet a girl in the room had broken up with her boyfriend because he would spread rumours for fun; the author was “always laughing when she was with them” and yet the boys we knew thought slut-shaming and violence were funny.
The entirety of my high school experience was blissful. It was – and still is – a space for women to support women, and I felt safe. Even during my first year of classes, I naturally gravitated towards the girls in my class – eventually becoming close with a few of them.
Unlike the mayhem portrayed in Mean Girls (2004), female friendships are meaningful. Female friends foster confidence and growth and are also backed up by science. A new study by the University of Queensland has found that women with strong friendships with each other tend to develop fewer chronic illnesses as they age. These friendships also lower blood pressure, boost immunity, and promote healing, which explains why women, on average, have lower rates of heart disease and higher life expectancies.
Having female friends is also empowering. Two years ago, my best friend started an all-female film company and directed her film – Abjection (2021). We planned, edited, and filmed for a physically and mentally taxing nine months. On film day, when I entered the warehouse at the crack of dawn, I felt intimidated and unsure. I only knew a handful of the crew and decided to stick close to them throughout the day, but when I came home at 2am in the morning, all I could think of was how empowered I felt by having women all around me. The experience was intimate and raw. A small bud had bloomed despite me knowing the cast for less than 24 hours. The more we talked in the following months, the more our flower blossomed. To this day, the feeling of being surrounded by women doing something huge is all I remember from that shoot. It’s something I will carry on for the rest of my life.
There’s a barrier that gets crossed within female friendship. I’ve talked about crass things and shown gross stuff to my friends, only for them to express their disgust and then say, “tell me more”. It’s a safe space and a judgement-free zone that I genuinely appreciate. In a community like mine, where topics of sex, bodies, and other everyday things are either hush-hush or only to be spoken about after you are married, it has helped my friends and me a lot. We weren’t taught sex-ed until many of us (and eventually their parents) lobbied against the PDHPE teacher. Ultimately, we were taught basic sex education and left with more questions than answers. We were then threatened that if word got out or we spoke about it outside we would be suspended. Of course, that did not stop a bunch of seventeen-year-olds from teaching each other more at the back of the class or in the locker room. No question there was stupid, and if none of us knew an answer, a quick Google search would suffice. Now that I look back, I realise it definitely was not the safest way to learn, however, the sense of love, patience, and respect we had for each other stands out.
My life is full of moments that embody what female friendships are truly about – sororal and familiar. There is a world that exists beyond burn-books and men, one where our friendships with women dare us and teach us how to love. Like the calm waves that stroke the sand, my sense of self swells and dips in the palms of women. I find myself and lose myself there, and it is through existing within it that I have become a woman myself.