Polly Vernon

IT’S TIME I CAME OUT. It’s overdue because – honestly? It’s been years since I first glimpsed my true nature. Decades! But, at last: I am ready! Emboldened by Lucie Love Island – she who prefers the company of men to women because, she says, ‘girls are drama’ – I feel I can finally be true to who I am, which is to say: not really a Girl’s Girl (or a Woman’s Woman, or whatever the appropriate terminology is).

It is a difficult thing to cop to, in the modern climate. A tacit rejection of girl gangs and squad goalz and all-female celebrity book groups and Twitter feminism and Goop… But it is (as the Love Islanders would say) what it is. Rather: I am what

I am – a woman who does not necessarily prefer the company of other women. I do not feel instinctively connected to those who share my biological sex.

Half the time, the way women behave is a mystery to me; like I’ve missed out on a series of memos regarding approved behaviour of my sex (starting with, why we have to call each other ‘the lovely INSERT NAME HERE’ all the time, moving on through: why, if we lose weight, or attempt to lose weight, we feel obliged to refer to it as ‘the’ weight). Furthermore, I am suspicious of those who do identify as a ‘girl’s girl’, because: you’re either protesting way too much, love, or you’re persisting with an irrational bias toward half the population in blatant disregard of the fact some women are awful. Just as awful as some men. (NB: I should know –

I am one.)

It’s never harder to not really be a girl’s girl than during wedding season (which is apparently On Again). When people get married, their social orbit is reduced to gendered ciphers. The men put on suits and pretend they’re scared it’s going to be them next and get violently drunk in Prague. The women worry about wearing hats and either pretend they’re sad they’re not the bride, or grow genuinely furious they’re not the bride. ‘Ladies’ favours’ become A Thing, so do couples hashtags, and BRIDE SLAMMED FOR INVITING FRIEND TO BRIDAL SHOWER BUT NOT HER WEDDING, and SQUEAL. The hen do – an enforced, extreme, regimented exercise in extended girliness – occurs, and girls fall out with other girls, because: That’s What Girls Do.

Meanwhile: I sit on the sidelines, failing and flailing in my assorted duties to girliness, wondering if everyone is on to me: if I’m managing to ‘pass’ as a wedding-adequate girl’s girl – or if I blew it back when the bride first told me she’d got engaged, and I said, ‘Whatever gets you through the night, babe.’