Friendeavours: let’s write a new Girl Code

I went to an all-girls school, and Lord was it bitchy. Hardly a day went by without a falling out, or someone being accused of ‘going off ’ with someone. I remember one girl sent me a long letter about why I was in every way unsuitable as a friend for her – the detail! – which ranged from my problem with punctuality to my hair looking ‘like cornflakes’. Oof ! We were all young and learning how to be social creatures, and I get that. But I also think something else was afoot – something I’m still prone to as an adult: the automatic expectation of female friendship with every woman I meet.

Female friendship is, as we know, life-changing when it happens. But I was talking to my friend Katie the other day and it struck me there can be something quite tyrannical about friendship when it is seen as a social requirement. This thought occurred when Katie and I were discussing a female TV presenter who we’d both met at some point over the years.

‘What do you make of her?’ I asked Katie. ‘What do I… make of her?’ Katie said, chewing the question, almost rhetorically. I realised my question had been loaded. Was I after a basic bitching session?

Katie snapped into philosophical mode. ‘I used to have two categories: “I love it” and

“It’s crap”,’ she said. ‘But as I get older, another category is opening wider and wider: “That’s cool, but it’s not for me”.’

Katie explained how she had put the TV presenter in this third category. ‘And there she shall remain,’ she concluded. ‘She is a great woman doing great things. I might not like her, but really likeability is an unevolved merit system, in a grown-up human lifetime.’

This is why Katie is a genius. I thought about it. I knew I had a tendency to make everything about emotional connections, and a squeamishness around transactions that weren’t based on what I perceived as deeper things, like friendship and love. But the reality is that this is why we end up skewering other women for the smallest misdemeanour, because they feel somehow close to us. Instead, we need to zoom out. Let’s reserve our bile for the real bad guys, the ones who are perpetrating a discourse of hatred (take your pick!).

As women in the workplace, we are clobbered with competing factors. We have to make things nice and comfortable BUT we also have to be hugely successful. Ambitious. Powerful. Fierce. But friendly! We can’t do both simultaneously. And it is very, very hard to do both alternately. But most of us try. ‘Women are the real architects of society,’ Cher famously said. But what if we don’t want to be? What if we want to be given a break from all the peacemaking and strategising? We want to support other humans. We value our Girl Code. But Girl Code can be oppressive. Or maybe the code should be rewritten, to be about respect, rather than BFF potential. We don’t have to like each other. Not liking doesn’t by default mean disliking. It can just mean neutrality: that’s cool, but it’s not for me.

Friendship is great when it happens, but from now on I’m going to try to not think of it as mandatory. I’m expanding my ‘She’s cool, but not for me’ category in the interest of progress. Let’s write a new kind of Girl Code, where we agree to live and let live, rather than like and be likeable.

‘Let’s reserve our bile for the real bad guys perpetrating a discourse of hatred. Take your pick!’