Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [14]
In short, when you’re with someone who is best-friend-worthy, there’s a special chemistry between you. Each woman can express herself in an authentic way without compromise and feel understood. A woman can trust her best friend with her secrets, share her insecurities openly, and count on her loyalty. Friendships provide women with a safe harbor that allows them to gripe and commiserate about roommates, romantic crushes, unrequited loves, and their husbands, sisters, bosses, mothers, and children. Being able to talk through and mentally rehearse problems with a third person helps immeasurably in working them through and transcending them.
These relationships, at their best, aren’t possessive. Instead, they help strengthen dating and marital relationships by providing a woman with a sounding board to work out feelings and resolve problems, with both other women and men. Thus, they can help improve parenting and friendship skills.
One woman uses the term “soul friend,” which comes from the Gaelic tradition of the Anam Cara, to describe this relationship. She writes: “It means a lot of things to me, including that someone may not make you happy but makes you grow into the highest and best you are meant to me. And at its most, it’s joyful. This soul friend is there sharing the journey with you until the end, your outer triumphs and sorrows, and your inner joys and demons—and loving you, making you laugh, loyal, listening, and supportive—yet in your face when she needs to be. She is simply part of your life in some form every day.”
In the book Eat, Pray, Love, author Elizabeth Gilbert translates the Italian phrase “un’amica stretta,” which means a close friend. She goes on to explain, “stretta literally means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a close friend, in Italian, is one that you can wear tightly, snug against your skin.”
A best friend is the exclusive friend we all want to have and the one we all strive to be: someone who is chosen from the pack to share the greatest degree of intimacy and closeness. Because these relationships are so exalting to the spirit, we feel like we’ve gotten the wind knocked out of our sails when they sour.
REAL VS. IDEAL
Unfortunately, the sentimental notion that all close friendships do or even should last forever—at a consistent level of intimacy—is more the hyperbole scrawled on T-shirts, greeting cards, and posters than it is reality. Sociologist Dr. Rubin points out that, like the shows we watch on the boob tube, most definitions of friendship are “idealized” and incorporate only positive attributes such as trust, honesty, respect, commitment, safety, support, generosity, loyalty, mutuality, constancy, understanding, and acceptance. Real friendships, however, are far more nuanced and multidimensional.
One woman admitted that her definition of a best friend sounded so mythical, even to her, that she wasn’t sure she had one. She describes a best friend as someone “who would be there for you at any time, who would drop other things for you, who would think about the things going on in your life (e.g., when you had your next appointment for a mammography), and a person whom you would feel completely comfortable with and her with you.” As wonderful as they may be, even our best friendships have their warts. And while we expect every close friendship to be enduring and last forever, this usually isn’t the case.
Too often, women romanticize the notion of a best friend (or even a very close friend) as someone who is a near-clone of her, the other half that makes them whole, the kindred spirit who will remain the same and be there for them forever, unconditionally. Because this can never be the case, relationships based on this ideal often end in bitter disappointment.
Instead, a friendship involves not one but two different people on two