I’ve heard it said that close female friendships are, for some of us, the great loves of our lives. More enduring than many romantic relationships. I’ve been married for 25 years, and my husband is my best friend, but well, it’s to my female friends I go to be completely understood.
It’s not a competition, but I remember the very first moment I saw my friend Kat. And unlike my husband, it was love at first sight. She was my friend before she knew she was my friend. I was obsessed with her. She didn’t know I existed.
She was hard to miss in the ’90s nightclubs of our misspent (actually best spent) 20s. Beautiful, vivacious, charismatic. And always on the podium, in a costume – which made her fairly high profile. Everyone knew who Kat was.
Whereas I was a wall-hugger. I danced in the shadows, an introvert in an extrovert world, content with the music and the other loners who felt safer in the dark. I knew social anxiety long before I knew its name.
If you’re imagining me there – Drew Barrymore hair, mini butterfly clips and a midriff tee – cut now to present day. Where all my tops meet my waist. Kat is turning 50. And I’m lucky enough, thanks to a lifetime of small moments that drew us close and ever closer, to call her one of my best friends. I love her truly, madly, deeply.
Kat is a ride-or-die, all-in friend who leads you astray because it is so much fun to let her. She is unique, although you probably have a friend like her. She is energy and drive and joy personified. Loyal and kind, with a generosity I can never top. When a neighbour gave us more lemons than we could use and I dropped some to Kat, I said to my daughter, “You watch, they’ll come back to us in a lemon slice.” Deliciously, I was not wrong.
My best friends are fierce fighters, sexy lovers, elegant dressers, brilliant trailblazers. Artists and leaders, scientists and healers.
JO STANLEY
Kat sends me photos of this column (Hi Kat!) with sweet words of praise that mean more to me than she knows. Friends like her step in where you can’t – whether it’s school pick-up or believing in yourself.
I’m fortunate to have a few, very dear female friends, collected through all of life’s stages and bad hairdos. They are an unbreakable network of love, laughter and soft-landings. I am Thelma to all these Louises. Or am I Louise to their Thelmas? I forget which is which. I suppose we’re all a bit of both – although I do lean towards the messy, impulsive one, especially if it includes a young Brad Pitt.
But I’d go on the run for any one of my friends – or at least drive them to the airport, which is a close second to plunging to our deaths into the Grand Canyon.
My best friends are fierce fighters, sexy lovers, elegant dressers, brilliant trailblazers. Artists and leaders, scientists and healers. I have watched them, resilient beyond measure, absorb the greatest hurts life can inflict and navigate healing with breathtaking grace.
I am continually inspired by these women, and my most vulnerable with these women. I basically seesaw between raw and awe, while together we take each other as we are, flaws and all.
We were raised on Golden Girls and graduated to Sex and the City. We learnt early that women could be family, and later that female friendship was sacred. In our teens, we were girls just wanting to have fun. In our 20s, Carrie taught us how to dress, Samantha showed us that we’re allowed to enjoy sex. And now in our 50s, I am so deeply proud of who we all have become. We walk and talk, gin and tonic (yes, that is a verb), laugh and cry. We’re no-holds-barred stories of love and sex and changing bodies.
We’re a universal help desk on all questions: menopause, parenting, finding the best jeans in your 50s. We are society’s quiet infrastructure, collectively doing the work of prevention. We catch each other before we crumble. Role-model, encourage and celebrate. Become women who are held – and therefore able to hold others. Our world is immeasurably better because one woman said to another, “You can do this.”
Or because one woman watched another on a podium and thought, she is so fun, I’m going to be friends with her even if it means leaving this darkness.
We are all shaped by our female friends. Through observation and osmosis, I plump cushions, power-dress, power-walk and quote poetry. And through the lens of my female friends – quite simply because these incredible women like me – I have learnt my own worth. Which may actually be the greatest love of my life.
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Jo Stanley is a writer, actor, radio broadcaster.Connect via X.
