friendship

Closeness means we’ll change each other ways we can’t predict. I’m still getting used to both that lightness and that weight.

The important part is choosing re-engagement and revival. Hua Hsu in Stay True: Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another's lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.

To be known is to be seen. You bring out a different side in yourself when you’re with that person. Some people make you more talkative, more secure, more experimental. In Winterson’s The Passion, Henri says this about love but I think it’s just as resonant of friendship: It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to... See more

True connection is sometimes lost in the way we currently articulate our friendships: through instagram tags or other forms of signaling. It’s when you feel comprehended, truly understood, free in ways you weren’t before.

women’s closeness in the past— even up until a decade or two ago— was measured by endurance, obligation, and willingness to show up for the other person for life’s joys or hardships. By contrast, today’s aesthetic of women’s closeness, at least within the mainstream, has been flattened into a fantasy of constant emotional fluency and “softness.” It... See more

Yet to admit as a woman that you’re lonely is, in a way, a failure of status. To admit to loneliness is to confess that you are not “chosen,” that you are not seamlessly integrated into the right microcultures. To be a lonely woman violates the expectation that women are naturally relational and socially fluent. Unlike male loneliness, female... See more

The expected reflex in our generation’s female friendships is to immediately validate and emotionally coddle, no matter what. Everyone wants the village, but nobody wants to be a villager.

or one, mainstream social norms for The Contemporary Woman (created by other Contemporary Women!) have pushed a narrative that womanhood automatically grants access to a warm, emotionally fluent collective.