Nourishing friendships – and those that drain…

We remember how fraught friendships can be as girls. How endlessly we talked about slights, falling out, our besties.  Then as we grow up, the focus switches to conversation about romantic relationships.  As women we discuss less the complicated emotional terrain of women’s friendships, perhaps because friendship is supposed to look effortless by now. Natural. If we’re good people and reasonably socially competent, surely friendship should just happen.  However, many women secretly carry an ache around friendship. Many women feel lonely, or put upon, or socially lacking.

It’s really not uncommon to feel slightly outside things. Wondering who you would actually call if something difficult happened. Looking at other women’s lives and imagining they must all belong somewhere more easily than you do. Or finding yourself in company, laughing, chatting, appearing perfectly sociable, while privately feeling disconnected and unseen.

Some friendships nourish us deeply. They create a kind of emotional shelter. They are the people with whom we can arrive exhausted, grieving, furious, jealous, ill, overwhelmed or ridiculous and still feel welcomed. We don’t have to tidy ourselves up first. We don’t have to perform cheerfulness or competence or emotional enlightenment. We can simply be human.

Those friendships are lifesaving.

A good friendship regulates the nervous system. How healing it is to be with someone in whose company your body softens a little. Someone who allows you to exhale; who doesn’t require you to become smaller, brighter, prettier, wiser or more successful in order to belong.

But friendship can also wound us in particularly confusing ways because the hurts are often slight and difficult to name. A cutting remark disguised as humour. Feeling subtly judged. Always being the one who listens while rarely being deeply listened to. Feeling emotionally useful rather than genuinely loved. There are friendships where you begin preparing yourself before you meet them, putting on the right version of yourself, managing the conversation carefully, anticipating the under-the-belt comment that will probably come at some point during the evening. And because there’s no dramatic event, we often don’t trust ourselves enough to acknowledge what’s happening.

Women are often encouraged to endure a great deal relationally. To be understanding. Flexible. Compassionate. Loyal. We can stay in draining friendships for years because we tell ourselves we are being kind, mature or forgiving, when actually we may simply be frightened of loss or loneliness.

But I also think modern culture has swung too far the other way. We now live in a time where relationships are sometimes discarded with alarming speed. The language of “protecting your peace” and “cutting off toxic people” has become so normal that ordinary human difficulty can start being interpreted as emotional danger.

Real friendship is not frictionless.

People disappoint each other. Friends become distracted, overwhelmed, self-absorbed or unavailable during difficult seasons of life. Someone forgets to check in. Someone says the wrong thing. Someone withdraws without explaining why. The question is not whether a friendship ever feels uncomfortable. The question is whether there is enough honesty, goodwill and mutual care for repair to happen when something goes wrong.

I remember years ago becoming convinced a friend no longer cared about me. She replied less often. She seemed distracted when we met. I started protecting myself emotionally and pulling back in return. Eventually, when we finally spoke honestly, I discovered her marriage was collapsing and she was barely holding herself together. None of her distance had been about me at all. I came away from that conversation humbled by how quickly human beings create stories in the absence of information.

Too many friendships die not from lack of love, but from lack of openness. We withdraw rather than risk awkwardness. We interpret rather than ask. We protect ourselves silently while longing to feel close again. And no wonder, honesty in friendship is frightening because it requires vulnerability. Women often carry deep grief about friendships they’ve lost, but feel slightly foolish admitting how much it hurt.

Friendship changes profoundly across a lifetime too. Some friendships belong beautifully to one chapter and cannot survive another. Motherhood changes friendships. Illness changes them. Divorce changes them. Growth changes them. Sometimes one woman begins becoming more fully herself while another remains attached to an older version of who she used to be. Sometimes friendships depend on one person staying small, struggling or self-sacrificing. Growth can threaten the balance of a relationship more than conflict does.

I think what many of us are actually hungry for now is not more social contact but more realness. More spaces where we do not have to perform. More relationships where we can say the true thing aloud. More friendships capable of holding complexity, contradiction and honesty.

Perhaps that’s why women gathering together still matters so much. Why circles matter. Why long conversations matter. Why hearing another woman say “me too” can feel unexpectedly healing. Because friendship at its best is not just socialising. It is one of the places where we discover whether we can truly be ourselves and still be welcomed.

And that is no small thing.