The Best Kind of Female Friendships

 

My friends are the kind of women who will send you flowers when your dog dies. Or they'll invite you over, wrap you in a blanket and hand you a cup of tea. They'll celebrate your birthday, listen to your stories, request to hear the funniest ones over again, and tend to you with Pepto Bismol when your happy hour goes terribly wrong. My friends and I love and encourage each other, 100% of the time.

I'm vaguely aware of an alternate reality in which women are mean to each other. When I met my husband, he'd had all too many experiences with this kind of woman and seemed to believe that female friends were prone to jealousy and fights.

Say, for example, one of my friends had to bail on a birthday celebration we'd been planning for weeks. He might have asked, in a tone mixed with suspicion and concern, "What happened to So-and-So?"

"Ahh, her kid has pinkeye!" I'd explain, or whatever it was. Our friendships remain solid even when one of us has to duck out for a while. There's nothing to fight about.

I know there's plenty of Mean Girls in the world and in the workforce. But I've been fortunate enough to remain blissfully immune to them, in part because I'm not interested in their friendship.

I'm friends with women who stick up for each other. Who help. Who call each other out when needed, but in the nicest possible way. I'm friends with smart, funny women who have bigger ambitions than cutting other people down.

I love them.

This blog is dedicated to Madge and to the Wolfpack: Jessica, Christy, Megan, Krista, and Kim. Thank you for being mine.