Transcription
Friendships are hard. Maybe we could be each other's soulmates, and then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with. Sometimes I felt like my female friendships are so rich and profound and intimate that it makes being in relationships with men actually harder. I don't want friends who make me question whether we're actually friends.
For years, when I've been asking women, friends, acquaintances, "What would you like to see covered? What are you wondering about?" They tell me the same thing. "Why are friendships so hard?" For a long time, I brushed it off. I thought, "It's just a fluff piece. It's not a real issue. Come on, guys." But something happened recently where I realized why it's so difficult and why it's causing us so much heartache, and how come it leads to so much divorce. That's what we're going to cover today.
Welcome to Psycho Bible. I'm Hannah Spear. Welcome back, Guli Leag. I'm excited to be here with you to cover friendships today. Female friendships, its cost and consequences, the risks involved, how can we navigate female friendships. As usual, please like and subscribe on your way in. Please head on over to my Substack and upgrade your membership if you haven't already to really support my work.
So, full disclosure, last week I had a fight with my husband, and um, I asked him, he said it was okay that I disclosed this, that we had a fight. And I had a playdate scheduled uh for that day. So, I was going to meet a friend. She's a she's a mom of three. We're going to the playground with our kids. I was really upset and I was tempted to vent. I wanted to get out my frustration and get some support. And then I had this moment where I consciously just decided to speak about something else because years ago, years ago, I decided I wasn't going to wash my marriage laundry uh with friends because I noticed I never came home feeling any better, any better about myself or about him or us. It was just uh all it did was I came home uh feeling strengthened, feel having more arguments to use against him. Uh, it would just continue the fight longer than it needed to. And we had a real talk about it, and he told me something that stuck with me. He said, "I would never talk about you to any of my guy friends." And I felt so guilty. I thought, "Of course, you know, I have to stop doing this." So, but it was it was that was real difficult last week. Um, but I I I managed and we talked about something else. We talked about the kids and birthday parties and I I came home, you know, having thought about something else, feeling a little lighter, and we managed to get back to normal and apologize and all of that.
But it was then that I realized, ah, you know what, female friendships have real consequences for how you behave in your marriage. Um, and I can imagine how exactly that interaction could have really led to something much worse. And then, as I showed you earlier, it was just per chance. I listened to the interview of uh with Brett Cooper where she says, "Adult friendships are so hard. They're so hard." Like I showed you in the beginning, and the internet is full of this "I have no friends" epidemic. It's all over TikTok. It's all over Instagram. People who are crying, they're lying at home saying, "I have zero friends. I have no friends." Then I realized something else. Over the last, like let's say 12 years, I haven't had the same female friends, group of friends, more than two years in a row. Is there something wrong? Am I doing something wrong?
And women are lonely. In 2021, 59% of women in the US reported feeling lonely. And young women, 18 to 29, they're twice as likely to feel lonely than older women. It's a growing problem. They're reporting to lose friends as well, and they feel considerable heartbreak when that happens. So, that small moment opened up something bigger for me. And what I've come to see is that our culture, especially this progressive, wellness-focused part of it, gets this completely wrong. We've we've romanticized female friendships and we misunderstand its function, and that misunderstanding has large consequences.
Sex and the City broke my generation. Broke it. It told us that female friendship is sacred. That your friends can be your soulmates. Take a look at this clip here. "Don't laugh at me, but maybe we could be each other's soulmates. And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with." Well, that sounds like the plan. This really affected women. On Instagram, you'll see these reels and these posts where we see how what women think of their friendships, what they think friendships should be, they idealize and they fantasize about it. Here are just some of the reels that I found.
"The thing is, you're going to go through a lot of friends in your life. And you're going to make a lot of friends. You're going to lose a lot of friends. It takes a really long time to find people in this world that actually match your energy and that like put the same effort in as you do." "You ever think about how friendship love is the purest form of love because you're not bound by anything? You just continue to choose each other over and over simply because you want to." "Going on dates with your best friend because she treats you better than any guy ever will." "The older you get, the more you realize it's not about who's known you the longest. It's about the ones who make you feel seen, heard, supported, and loved." "Friendship should be pure and intimate and timeless and unconditional."
This this belief has has shaped a generation of women and it continues to do so. We end up hurting ourselves because we forget what we've what we're primed for, that friendship should should serve a purpose. Let's look at the research together. Joyce Benninsson, she's a renowned evolutionary psychologist and she wrote the book Warriors and Warriors and uh the review Thriving Together: The Benefits of Women's Social Ties. And she makes it very clear that female bonds are especially strong and intimate because they need to share a common goal, a purpose. And that used to be child rearing. They need to have to share activities or share a common goal. That goal used to be surviving and caring for the next generation.
Research also shows that female friendships are more intense and um emotionally laden. They are um more intimate than male bonds between each other. She finds that men can compete more openly with each other, that they have more joy in competing, that they behave differently after they've competed with each other, that women and uh women, because we're vulnerable, our task is to bring up a group of children together, our bonds are more fragile. They're very dependent on loyalty. This is why in surveys among women when they're talk about having broken up with friends, listing the reasons that their friends aren't loyal, that they don't call back, that's at that's on the top of the list. And also very interestingly, we don't like when our relationships are unequal. We prefer egalitarian relationships. And that's why Tara Reynolds, Professor Tara Tara Reynolds, she talks about this, that when women, we need to acquire resources as a as a group and we we need to protect each other, it's important that we're able to acquire resource resources in equal amounts. So that's why we don't prefer friends who are more attractive than us, for example, who have an easier time getting male attention because that makes our bond more fragile. Why should she be friends with me if she's so great and can go and do all the resource acquiring herself? So we are just primed to have this tight-knit group in which we can child rear together. And that's why women, Joyce Benson also talks about this, women are geared to survive for generations. So our grandmothers survive so that they can child rear with us because men were dispensable. One male who inseminates lots of females and he dies very early in life, but he's still going to leave a lot of um offspring. So whether that's humans or others, doesn't matter. And um he doesn't have to worry that much about survival. But females, if we're talking about mammals, are the ones who have to take care of the offspring. And this certainly goes for humans. And not only do mothers, but grandmothers and humans. So we're really taking care of offspring for many, many decades um have to take care of offspring. So it's no good to engage in dangerous tactics that would be stupid in terms of being able to take care of your offspring and your grandchildren, too. So number one, I would say females are safe. And part of being safe is if you have a competitive interaction, if you have a conflict, um you better be subtle about it because if you go up as a male might and you know punch somebody in the face or um verbally harang them or engage in any kind of very nonsle direct behavior, then that's more likely to invite retaliation. So uh retaliation obviously can lead to a lot of injury and even death, and that males across many species are willing to do that because again, as I said before, they can still leave many offspring, but females can't because after a long period of gestating and lactating uh you have to invest in protecting your offspring and usually without the help of the male, and with humans, it varies whether there's a male to help or not, whether the father's around, another male, not clear. So it's very important again that um one is subtle in conflicts in competition and and we we know how important it is that our kids are attached to the same people. You know that you c you can't just change out the kids attachment figures willy-nilly. For women who have kids in daycare, you'll know this. You get upset if every week you pick up your kid and there's a different woman giving you your child. That upsets you because you know it upsets the child. So they're back to the loyalty. It's very important to us that our friends are loyal so that they'll stay in our group because you can't just change people out. This is different. If you have a hunting party and someone comes and they're better at hunting than the rest of you, you think, "Oh, great for the group." That's a very different dynamic. This is that's also why we respond to stress in a different way. There's a theory called tend and befriend. While men have more of the fight fight or flight, uh we women when we're stressed, we turn to our social bonds. So that's why research also shows that when we don't have friends, we do worse mentally and physically. Our social ties are really necessary for us to live long healthy lives. So no wonder that this loneliness, "I have no friends" epidemic has such a powerful impact on mental health. The problem is that we don't know how we bond. The problem is that we are no longer able to keep those bonds. And the problem is that, I'm sorry it's unpleasant to hear, but it's difficult for married women and single women to stay friends because like Joyce Bennison said, we we need to have shared goals, shared purpose, shared activities. We need to share faces of our lives.
"This is the first time in my life where I don't have a group of friends. I I really don't. I don't have any group of friends that, you know, I'm texting to hang out on the weekends or I'm making plans with. Now, everyone I interact with are people that have really shown me they are the people that want to be in my life. I get really sad about it sometimes because I'm like, 'Wow, I don't have a group of friends to just talk to and feel like I'm a part of.' But when I get older, I'm going to have friends." She would always say, "One hand, one hand if you're lucky."
So, in the media, all we've seen are these friend relationships where people are constantly hanging out and people are each other's best friend, ride or die. And that, like I said, for many of us is just not the reality. The reality is that friendship, especially as an adult, looks very, very different than that. It looks, and this is in my life, friendship in my life, and I'm sure in many of your lives, looks a little something like this. Looks more like this. It looks like not talking to some of your friends for months on end and then having one like 2-hour phone call and then not talking to them again for another 3 to 6 months and having another 2-hour phone call where you get to catch up on things. Or it's calling each other after work and chatting briefly on your drive home.
And so when I said I haven't had the same friends over the past 12 years, it's because I moved. So, I relocated. I got I went from single to married. I went from uh work from working mom to not working mom. And those things are obviously going to affect all of my friendships. And I notice as a stay-at-home mom, I need very different things than when I'm a working mom and I only have time on a Sunday to meet up with someone. And I've had single girl single girlfriends mock me for talking about my kids, talking about trivial things. Like last week when I met up with this other mom of three and we only talked about upcoming birthday parties and who's invited. And I in the back of my head thought, "How frivolous this must sound if anyone overhears us." And I have been mocked before for talking about these things. Single friends have told me, "Is that really what you want to talk about? Is that really how we're going to spend our time?" As if signaling, "I'm so much better than this. I'm elevated from my primal self and I've found my true self. I've risen above."
When you're posting reels about feeling lonely, you're literally sinking into your bed sheets from loneliness. Women mock these simple interactions, not understanding their purpose through Sex and the City, through all of those shows that if you think about it, there were a lot of shows detailing friendships between two girls, three girls, or a group. We internalize the idea that our girlfriends should always come first.
"The most important thing in life is your family. There are days you love them and others you don't, but in the end, they're the people you always come home to. Sometimes it's the family you're born into, and sometimes it's the one you make for yourself."
"It's hard to find people who will love you no matter what. I was lucky enough to find three of them. If we were girls together, do you know how special that is? We talked all night about falling in love, but that was the love story. We were already in it. Being girls with you was the greatest joy of my life. Anyone who has loved me after you has loved us. Girlhood is a part of the foundation of every version of me I've ever been and every version I ever will."