are female friendships setting you up to fail?
a controversial-ish take on female bonds
Over the last few days, I found myself astonished by how smart you are, which let’s be honest, happens a lot.
After I posted a clip from the Man Enough podcast about how female friendships have set an impossible standard for my romantic relationships with men, a whopping ten million of you watched and reacted passionately with a wide range of personal and potent responses. “Female friendship just hit different,” one woman commented on tik tok. “My platonic friendships are so fulfilling that it’s impossible for me to settle for anything else,” someone else wrote on instagram. “I always have problems with dating because it feels so surface levels and empty with men sometimes,” said another.
Under these posts are a combined ten thousand comments (and counting) with most of them supporting what I like to call female friendship supremacy, the core belief that women just do friendship better than men. And while I agreed with most of them, it left me wondering if more nuance is needed on a topic that seems to have such unilateral consensus. Are female friendships really perfect? And if they are, wouldn’t they prepare us for romantic relationships with men, rather than impede our ability to engage in them? When I’m on social media, I’m left wondering if women are in fact irreproachable, and men hopeless, and I have a sneaking suspicion the answer might be somewhere in between.
But most importantly, by expecting our female friends to be more like life partners, and our husbands to be like our friends, are we setting up both to fail?