No, I'm Not "One of the Guys" And I'm Cool With That

I never understood why people underestimated "the girlfriends."

No, I'm not referring to the ladies lovingly slinked over chiseled biceps, consistently posting flicks of her #MCM and with his name saved as a set of the heart eyed emojis in her phone.

I'm talking about the girl-franssss, which nobody wants to proudly claim anymore for some reason. 

Last month, I went to two sleepovers. For the first one, my friend had planned for it to be this big thing with facials, manis and pedis, movies and life planning. There ended up only being 6 of us: her, me, her best friend, her co-worker, and her two overly affectionate tabby cats, Vera and Irve (yes, like the designers). I only really knew her well, but I didn't leave feeling that way. We spent hours watching (and then suffering from soured moods from) Winnie Mandela, starting on Sarafina before pausing the movie midway to vent about ain't-shit men and opening up and closing off and how men really feel about us and dirty secrets and Beyonce and sexual abuse and music and self-confidence and sex appeal and God and husbands and loyalty. It was one open forum that kept flowing as consistently as the wine did. Nothing was withheld from the table, no pages left unturned, no apprehension. No judgement. And it felt amazing to share experiences both surface and impersonal to the innermost gnats of emotions with people whose last names we left never even asking. Cutting up both literally and figuratively, working to assemble our vision boards that we didn't even take home the next morning. But we took home the joy of bonding with our fellow women.

The second was a Grammy watching party, where most of us had to work to cover the event. While glued to our laptops, we screamed to the heavens upon finding out that Macklemore swept all the hip hop categories, critiqued the peaks and shortcomings of Beyonce and Jay Z's half-Drunk in Love performance, twerked to Katy Perry, experienced the holy Ghost during Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons' set, sipped on Mimosas, screwdrivers, and plain juice, shared juicy chicken, ate slightly undercooked rice without judging the cook (LOL, the chicken was seriously delish though!) and stuffed our face with Dunkin' Donuts minis that we KNEW were in violation of our diets and exercise regimens. We drifted into conversation about our journalism futures and where we wanted our careers to go before drifting into slumber.

I was literally overjoyed leaving both get-togethers, excited to have had such candid bonding time with my gal pals. But for some reason unbeknownst to me, that's not all too high on other women's priority lists.  

I used to always hear from my friends, "I don't even like hanging out with females (cringeworthy nouns!!). Too much drama. That's why I have mostly guy friends."

I always felt left out, because that just wasn't the case for me. I had an abundance of girl friends, and for a long time thought something was wrong with me why it wasn't the other way around. Was I not attractive enough to attract all that testosterone?? Was I not funny? I didn't have flocks of fictional "brothers" ready to fight for me at the drop of a dime. I wasn't one of the guys. I didn't loathe the drama of "females." 


I am a woman and love more than anything to be in the company of fellow period-loathers. You can't get that type of unfiltered companionship with those that can't share any similar experiences with you. You can learn to think like a man, learn all the tricks and how to play/cheat the game, build a thick skin due to tough love, know how to camouflage your femininity so you can be immune to the complaints the fellas spew out about us "difficult" women, but when it comes down to it, nothing can take the place of girlfriend time. It's necessary to have girlfriends, yes, plural. And sorry boo, you're a liar if you say otherwise.

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