From ‘Bridesmaids’ to ‘Something Borrowed’

Female friendships are a tricky thing. One day you're sitting drunk in a darkened theatre shout whispering to your current closest friend, "Omigod! That main character experiencing the most awkward sex scene ever documented… that's so you!" and she's right there with an, "Oh god! You're so right… Oh shit and she has an ethnic best friend too!" And over Sour Patch Kids and diet coke, we watch our lives played out on the big screen never feeling closer to each other than in that moment.

Two days later, you're in the same movie theater with the same friend, watching a different BFF movie disguised as a chick flick, but this time stone cold sober, denying even the sugar rush from the Sour Patch Kids being insistently offered because your stomach is filled with angry bile threatening to spew over and burn your friend's eyes out. As the formerly best friend characters on the screen do one shitty thing after another to each other, once again you watch your life play out well aware of the irony and its comic timing.

Unfortunately, unlike the movies, the real life problem is so much more complicated, just as the warm bond before was deeper and more meaningful than something the editors cut together for popcorn narrative logic. Being a girl and being friends with other girls is a bitch and something only the thick skinned and brave can weather safely. The hurts we cause each other are never cut and dry and rarely obvious. Most times all we know is that there's a big ball of pain wedged in your ribcage and that girl over there who you trusted with everything is responsible for it, even though you can't say exactly how or why. But you know, man, you know that she done something shitty and you know that she know she done something shitty and she be actin' all like she don't know and that hurts even more. Because you feel stupid. Stupid because you can't explain what happened and how exactly she hurt you, which makes you soooo mad. Not just because of what she did, but because she ruined what you had. She ruined your favorite bar, your favorite activities, you favorite place to study. She ruined your favorite person to laugh with, cry with, drink with, and stay up late to just talk with. The future just seems a little dimmer.

From here it's 50/50 whether the friendship survives. Forgiveness and acceptance needs to happen, and some forgetting for the magnanimous ones. Lord knows, I won't be forgetting. I'm not big enough for that. Either way whatever is salvaged is not the same. Friendships with girls are the worst. I just wish they weren't also the best.