Not a "Girl's Girl"? You Should Be.

My college friends have started having babies, and last year, we held our inaugural moms and babies trip. This summer, the trip went to new heights as we traveled to Georgia and spent four days just watching our babies all play together and enjoying the company of one another. There was a point in my life where I wouldn't have described myself as a "girl's girl." Now, this is one of the labels I slap on myself first and most ferociously. My journey from anxious individual to eager friend is one that has been immeasurably rewarding, and I hope that it can inspire anyone who is hesitant about female friendship to give it another try.

Getting to follow each other from college, to career, to motherhood is a privilege that cannot be understated. I have vivid memories of my friends as fiery single women (watch out, boys), stressed entry-level employees, excited brides, and anxiously expectant mothers. Watching them move into sunscreen-applying, grape-quartering, back-rubbing mothers of angels has made me pause and be grateful for female friendship.

If you know my story, you know that I grew up with a single father. One of the very few downsides to this is that I didn’t experience a lot of mother-daughter play dates where the moms hang out while the girls play dress up and perform choreographed routines in someone’s living room (this is something that I imagine to be common in the lives of two-parent households AND something that I cannot wait to experience more with my own daughters). I think that this caused me to develop as more of an introvert and as someone who gravitated to one-on-one friendships instead of big groups of friends as I was in school. Because of some experiences as a child, I saw that girls were competitive with one another and that they were prone to meanness and gossip. This also created in me a confusion about adult female friendship because I wasn’t able to see it modeled very much. Once I got to college and pledged a sorority (at the heavy-handed insistence of my wonderful grandmother), I immediately felt ill-equipped to manage friendships with the literal hundreds of girls who were being kind and welcoming to me. I remember being anxious about hanging out with all of my new “sisters” because conversation and the norms of group female friendship came so naturally to them whereas I was second-guessing my every move (exhausting, to say the least). What if they didn’t really like me? What if they were being dishonest and actually just wanted to gossip about me? What if they thought I was too much work to get to know?

In September of 2013, I had a moment where I broke down because I felt like such an outsider. I prayed specifically for God to lead me to female friends who would accept me for all of my differences and would stick with me through the upcoming seasons of life. I remember visceral anxiety about if I were to ever find myself engaged to be married because I didn't know of more than maybe two girls who would want to be my bridesmaids. Shortly after this, I met the first installment of the girls who would become my forever friends, and I decided to take a chance and to put myself out there to be loved.

They weren't perfect. They weren't always put together. They weren't always selfless. But they loved Jesus and they wanted to love me. It took time, but before I knew it, I was a true, honest-to-God member of a group of female friends.

The first pillar of successful female friendship, at least for me, is transparency. I quickly noticed that these girls loved to be together 24/7 and in all of the grime and informality of life. They wanted to be neck-deep in each other’s issues, successes, and experiences. They wanted to TRULY know me. I had to learn how to intentionally show my flaws and to open up instead of pretending everything was fine. Once I mastered this (partially due to events that were out of my hands), I found that these girls actually wanted to be there for me. This was a feeling that made me feel powerful and emboldened and understood.

The second element that was essential to building these relationships was effort. If you lean towards introversion, you know that we love to be lazy. I could easily melt into my own space and watch three to four days slip by, if I let them. These girls showed me that if I wanted people to invest in me in an authentic way, I had to actually put in the work to invest in them. This meant that instead of watching 27 episodes of TV alone or reading an entire novel in one sitting while locked in my room, I would go over to a friend's house. There, we would watch TV while discussing her latest success in school, or I would lie on her couch and read while she worked on homework. It meant that instead of ordering delivery, I would ask if anyone wanted to meet for dinner. It meant that instead of grocery shopping alone, I would see if anyone wanted to go with me to the store. Of course, I still did these things alone sometimes (because I love my alone time), but just inviting people into the mundane activities of my life and intentionally seeking out the people I wanted to be friends with helped to forge strong bonds; these girls saw that I cared enough to spend time with them. Time together naturally creates a closeness that helped me eventually not have to try so hard to feel known.

The final, and arguably most important, part of my friendship success has been commitment. I have lost friends throughout the years- both for good and bad reasons, but any friendship that I have maintained is solely because of commitment. There are no humans that are always easy to love, and in order to stand the test of life changes, you have to commit to continually loving your friends. This means that you decide NOT to talk badly about them when they make a decision that you don’t support. Instead, you pray about the decision and have specific, honest conversations WITH the friend. It means that when they hurt you (notice I said When, because humanity is pain), you let yourself have space but do not forget that your friendship is more important than your disagreements. You can look at literally all of my friendships, and I could tell you of the highs and lows that we have experienced, but the thing that you will see over anything else is the commitment that we have to making sure that we are there for each other.

If you are someone who doesn’t do well with female friendship (or friendship in general), let me urge you to try again. Adolescence can create wounds in people that frame their adulthood, and while some of these serve to protect us, the qualms that we have about female friendship should be pushed aside. We are not made to walk alone, and finding veracious friendship can strengthen you like you have never known. There is something magical about women supporting women within this insane world.

Send her a message. Invite her over. Invest in her, and open your heart to allowing yourself to be loved. Keep trying. Try again. It is worth it.