(Yes, that is Anne of Green Gables and Diana Barry, founding members of the Female Friendship Hall of Fame.)
I never thought I would be married with two kids and still having sleepovers with my best friend from time to time, but you just can’t write this stuff, can you? I think romantic relationships are great and all, but I’ve never thought they should eclipse friendships.
Because I have already let the sleepover cat out of the bag, I might as well tell you a little something about my concept of female best friendship—specifically with the kind of young lady you’ve grown up with.
Please note, these theories are influenced not by logic but by only child related loneliness in pre-bestfriendship early youth, and a tendency to emotionally overdo it pretty much all the time.
In short, bestfriendom is sort of how I (ignorantly, childishly, fairytale-ishly, I know) picture twinship to be—containing all of the following apocryphal features of the twinhood that lives in my mind, but does not, under any circumstances that I know of, exist in the actual twinverse.
With all this in mind, here are some features of female friendship (as it exists in my warped mind):
1. telepathy
2. the hunch that you know her every thought spiral and feeling coil
3. a hankering to tell her everything as it’s happening (what hasn’t been telegraphed telepathically due to cases of faulty wiring, no doubt)
4. the desire to protect, and perhaps even sing lullabies, but only during the time you’re not having a fit of hysterical giggling over the funny voices you’re both so very good at, which is almost always
5. the suspicion that you know nothing better than the smell of her skin, which frequently recalls some combination of sunscreen and vanilla (yes, in all lady friendships this is the case–it can be scientifically proven with a beaker, or you can just perform an old-fashioned sniff test).
6. an inkling that, if you were forced to put it into words, you might say you knew her so well that she was the human equivalent of déjà vu
7. sudden urges to call her in the middle of the night on a can phone
8. bouts of being certain that you can feel when she’s in danger (that usually prove to be some variation on indigestion, but, hey, you never know, so that 3 a.m. tin can phone call just may be in order)
9. an inability to sit across from her in a room without breaking into the fits of helpless laughter that used to get you kicked out of math class
10. parentheses and em dashes (no, that’s not a symptom of best friend twinship, but of my writing—I’m working on it)…
Now, can anyone tell me about male friendships? I have no idea about those.