This is a column from 2011 that speaks to this day especially after just returning from my annual beach trip with the "blood sisters" of my childhood, Chanda included!
Having observed a house full of men for the past twenty-four years, I have noticed quite a difference in the way men view their friends. It is like a brotherhood. They support each other. They go to each other's gigs or games. They listen when one breaks up with a girlfriend. It's a really long conversation that consists of "I don't know. She's nuts!" And then the male friend nods his head in agreement. They comment on each others clothes by saying things like, "Dude, is that my jacket? Yeah it is. That's the burn place I got when we had the marshmallow fight at the fire." In short, men friendships are a different thing entirely.
Women friendships are a sisterhood that defies the term sisterhood. We hand pick them at early ages and place them in a special role in our lives. And I think the one thing that makes BFF's true BFF's is because women have a void that needs to be filled. I'm not saying that men cannot fill it. I'm saying that men do not want to fill it. And they are so appreciative when their wife or girlfriend's friend can fill it for them.
If you ask your husband how you look in an outfit, you are always going to look great because he knows it's a loaded question to begin with. And it is a loaded question. But women friends know how to get around it. They don't have to say, "Well, it makes your butt look huge." They know to say, "It's just not your color."
And when a woman has had a confrontation with another woman and they choose to vent to their spouse, the man often says, "Well, the whole thing sounds kind of stupid anyway. This started over a parking place?" But a female friend understands that the parking place was a metaphor for "You are not considering my feelings about the situation." And the friend without being ugly on either side simply nods and says, "She could have been a little sensitive considering the situation." And the guy in the background is shaking his head thinking, "I'm so glad she's got a friend because I'm still only hearing parking place."
Just as we have no concept of what it is to go through puberty with testosterone, they have no idea what it is like to have PMS. Just as we did not have to worry because our grandfather was bald, they have no idea what it is like to have a hot flash. In the yin and yang of marriage the balance can only exist if men have friends to hunt and fish with and women have friends to exercise with, discuss children with, and have melt downs with.
I remember the day Chanda and I were kids, and we were roaming around on her farm. We decided we were going to mimic Grizzly Adams, a 70's show, and we were going to become blood brothers like he had done with this Indian. Well, the ritual consisted of cutting your hand open and pressing it to the other cut to show a binding friendship. As we debated how exactly we would press a knife to our skin, we opted to find a scab somewhere on our body and scratch it off. We both soon did. Little girls who grow up out in the country always have a scab or two. We rubbed our blood together and were blood sisters for whatever that meant.
We were little girls. It would take years to learn that being a woman and a friend means that you love other women the way you want them to love you with kind words, complete support, healthy advice, and unconditional love. And in doing that, we keep the men in our lives sane because they are looking at their BFF saying, "I don't know, dude. They're nuts." And we are, but we don't build tree houses in the middle of the woods to go sit in when it's thirty degrees in hopes of getting the chance to kill something. That's sane? Grizzly Adams could have easily found a scab, and I'm sure all my friends would agree!
