The Liberation of Lifelong Friendship

People collect all sorts of things: old cameras, beanie babies, first edition books, pottery, vintage record albums. I myself am a collector – though until several years ago I didn’t realize it. I felt a little like one of those hoarders you see on those terribly awesome reality shows, who when confronted about the mountains of debris piled in drifts around their homes, can’t ever seem to remember how it started but now they can’t even use their own kitchen because of the boxes of piled in it. I myself am a hoarder of sorts. But it isn’t stuff I hoard. It’s women. I collect fabulous women and I’ve been doing it my entire life.
I realized I had an obsession with surrounding myself with fabulous women about five years ago. Because when I lose one to the natural life cycle of friendships it kind of kills me. It was during one of those natural friendship endings that I realized I very rarely give up a friend once I make that friendship connection. Which means I have friends from elementary school through college, friends in every part of the country, friends from work, soccer mom friends, liberal friends and friends who lobby for the NRA, friends who refer to me as “their much younger friend” (by the way, Diane, you really have to stop doing that), and friends who held hands and jumped off the turning forty cliff along with me this year. Fabulous. All of them.

And just like some snobby wine sommelier ,I can tell you about the uniqueness of each sort of friendship. Some are tangy, some are sweet, some have hints of black pepper, and some have a fruity finish. But as every sommelier knows the older vintages typically (though not always) have complexity and a smoothness that is simply fantastic.

And that is true about all those high school and college girlfriends we all still have. Because those bitches know where the bodies are buried. These are the chicks who held back our hair while we puked outside of the keg party. These are the girls who saw us make terrible dating decision and equally terribly fashion decisions (I mean whoever invented shoulder pads should be flogged publicly). These are the girls who snuck out of the house after curfew with us so we could rebel by smoking cigarettes and drink a Bacardi Breezer. They saw us crushed by our first breakup and head over heels in love with the boy of our dreams who is now an alcoholic house painter living in Southern California.

And here is the beauty of our relationship with these women: pretending we are anything other than who we are is futile. So while some of our newer friends may think that we have some degree of dignity and sanity as our adults-selves, our old friends know better. And since they already know, we can simply BE OURSELVES! Which is incredibly liberating. And it cuts out having to explain the dark parts of our back story because they have lived it with us. We don’t have to explain that we have trust issues because they watched those trust issues being born. We don’t have to wonder when in the friendship we might confess some icky family secret and how it’s affected our lives because they already know it and they’ve watched how it has shaped our lives over the years.

We can pick up right where we left off with them, as if no time has passed. No pretense. No representative. Just us, our awkward sixteen-year-old selves and our equally goofy sixteen-year-old friends.

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