My Missing Galentine
Every Valentine’s Day more and more of my female friends are taking the opportunity to spend time together. I’ve seen invites for confidence-boosting lingerie photoshops, self-care workshops, and dressy dinners.
There’s no shortage of female-empowerment programming in the middle of February.
While I hold many women dear, there’s one friend whom I wish was still around to share mushy Instagram captions with. The one who got away, if you will.
This year I’m inspired to spend time reminiscing on platonic love lost. Like Jennifer Senior writes, when your romantic life is settled, it’s friends who break your heart.
Trying to make friends as an adult
Hey Bestie
The language between childhood best friends is hard to articulate. It stays with you long after the friendship is over. Odd mannerisms, strange humour, a strong attachment to weird junk food… it all comes rushing back at the oddest moments.
For 15 years my best friend and I were inseparable. That’s three times longer than I’ve known my husband.
From age 3 to 18 there were rarely days we weren’t together. I vacationed with her family, she spent school mornings at my house, and once a week I slept over at hers. I called her mom “mom 2,” and her little brother was mine by proxy. We spent more time, shared more secrets, and went through more life milestones together than I have with anyone else. We went from shopping for Tamagotchis and Heelys to apartment rentals and furniture.
In the end, it’s hard to say what broke us. Friend breakups are more ambiguous than romantic ones. At the time, I thought she tore the rug out from under me. Looking back, I think she saw me pulling away. In my eyes, she was checked out of the world for a boy.
We were never perfect. We prevented each other from growing and testing the waters outside of our own little bubble. In high school, it was integral that we stick together, even to our detriment. When I joined a sorority in university, I think it was the beginning of the end. The result is bittersweet. I came out of my shell in university and completely changed the course of my life. If I had had her as my crutch, I don’t know what would have happened.
I learnt what it was like not to rely on one person, but I lost her in the process.
A decade later, I still catch myself wanting her opinion. I remember more nuances from our relationship than from any of my exes, and I often stumble across news that only she would appreciate. Anyone who met me in my twenties can’t possibly understand the cringe-y levels of obsession we had with Twilight or the sheer amount of Depeche Mode we consumed on the bus rides home. There are inside jokes that will never be funny to the adults I’m meeting now. Gooblegozia is a fictional world none of my current friends have access to. The Labyrinth is a cinematic masterpiece none of them understand.
The person who bore witness to my developing mind is now a stranger. While I’m grateful that our breakup led me to learn more about myself, it’s hard not to feel like a chunk of history is missing a key narrator.
When she left, she took a whole part of my life with her.
Me, my social anxiety, and my seasonal depression busting out of lockdown
What is Love?
In platonic breakups, there’s no clear way of “getting back together.” We were a unit, and there’s no way to integrate in that same way again. To start up again would be to create a whole new language.
Friendship is powerful because it’s a choice. There’s no legal contract or ring on your finger to remind you of your promise. At most there’s a clunky BFF necklace from Claire’s sitting in storage. As a parent, you commit to the role fully and forever. As a spouse, you work toward the same. For friends there are no major expectations – people move, date people you don’t like, join MLMs – and the relationship recalibrates.
Or, simply, it doesn’t.
The way friendships die is depressingly simple: it’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you.
After two years of isolation, everyone is struggling to get their relationships afloat. In fact, the percentage of Americans who say they don’t have any close friends has quadrupled over the last 30 years.
I’ve seen families divided by vaccines, partnerships fuse into one personality, and friendships disappear into thin air. Hell, even Miranda from Sex and The City has evolved into something unrecognizable. If the fictional characters can’t handle it, what hope do the rest of us have?
We’ve collectively struggled through isolation, anxiety, and a disruption of routine. We’ve been trained to keep our distance as a safety precaution, but isolation is a hard habit to break. Some have posed that it might be easier to convince ourselves that we love being alone than experience the discomfort of reuniting. Why risk a failed connection when Netflix has never led us astray?
When I think about who I was at the start of this pandemic compared to who I am now, I’m not sure that they’d like each other. I’m even less sure my friends will.
With everyone evolving in their own apartment cocoons, it’s impossible to know what the next few years will bring. Who do we choose to stay close to when after we’ve been locked in with our own thoughts for years? Will I still make the cut when people reprioritize their social bubbles?
I Must Confess
I find myself predictably jealous of those who’ve held onto their childhood friend groups.
I’ve inserted myself into a few – like a lost creature being adopted into a new flock - but sometimes I get paranoid that they think they’re better than me for having maintained lasting friendships. I wonder if their invitations are an act of charity for someone unable to uphold the basic tenants of being a “BFF”.
I imagine people flaunting friendships like designer bags, a close-knit group from kindergarten being the Birkin of besties.
Out of curiosity, I asked my readers how many still had close friends from childhood. Every single person who answered had at least one.
So, it turns out, I’m the anomaly.
Many saw the strength of their friendships as a point of pride. There’s a superiority in having such long-lasting partnerships. Women can be competitive about the level of connection they’ve cultivated. Knowledge about someone’s life and inner workings are currency. The more deeply you know your friends, the better your girl gang is.
For someone like me, each close friend starts at a built-in deficit. I will never be the girl who helped them through first love or first-period math. I am forever second to whoever was there first.
Michelle Ruiz articulates this same sentiment in her article for Vogue:
That our love for one another has survived decades, distance, politics, sickness, and plenty of problematic men feels like an achievement… But if keeping a friend is an achievement, is losing a friend a failure?
If it is, then my ex-best friend and I both failed. I wonder if she ever thinks about me as a loss. How many friend groups has she been the newest addition to? Are we further connected by the lack of this relationship, or is it too far gone to even ask?
A couple of years ago I reached out. It was a full moon on Friday the 13th, and I couldn’t think of a better way to honour a childhood of horror movies and dark jokes. I apologized for whatever might have transpired between us, but, as soon as I sent the message, I realized I didn’t know the girl on the other side of the screen. I remember her home phone number, the two houses she grew up in, the names of all her early family cats, her first crushes, but not who she is right now.
As much as we grew together, we’ve now grown apart. What we had was special, but it’s rooted in a specific time. In all the time since we’ve parted, I’ve never found someone that’s connected in the same way. For that, she will always hold a special place in my memory.
I might not have my childhood partner, but I still have enough Galentines to fill my heart and calendar. So, after all that, I still believe in the holiday.
My loneliness ain’t killing me no more.
