Girlfriends

I expect this post will contain a certain amount of rampant sexism, and not even be funny, to boot.

There's just something about female friends. I haven't had a close female friend in a long time, not since leaving Corpus and Denise behind. Generally I get along better with guys - not that I don't get along with other women, but for some reason the "click" of close, comfortable friendship seems to be a lot harder to achieve with my own sex.

But when it does happen, it's something special. There's this automatic common ground, shared experiences, shared perspectives, shared context. When it does happen, the flow of ideas and support and confidences is much more natural than it is with guy friends.

Maybe it's that, even though a girl can confide in her male friends, the conversation tends to go one way. My best male friends will happily lend an ear or a shoulder, but they almost never tell me the sort of things about themselves that I'll tell them about me, or at least not as much. It's generalizing, but I think it's true to a certain extent that men just don't connect in the same fashion that women do. They also just don't get certain things about my feelings or behavior that another woman, immediately and intuitively, can grasp. So, conversely, if a close guy friend has been giving me a certain piece of advice for months and months, and I haven't been willing to listen to him, a close female friend can give me the same piece of advice and seal the deal. It must be so. A woman would know.

Not in any way to endorse that stupid "men are from Mars" crap. Last time I was at Planet K I bought a button for my backpack, which says:

"Giving your heart to a man is like giving a computer to a dog."

I should also have bought another one I liked just as well, although the message might be contradictory:

"Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Get over it."

But I only had a buck-fifty on me.

We're all people, we all struggle with the same issues from time to time; we all have feelings; we all get hurt. Sometimes very badly. We deal with it in different ways and show it in different ways, and - I've always assumed primarily for social reasons - women tend to deal with it similarly, which makes it a lot easier sometimes to understand and be understood by a good girlfriend.

And if all the above weren't reason enough to have at least one close girlfriend, it's a lot easier to have hilarious conversations about penis size.