100 best girlfriends

no greater love than this

Content warning: Quoted reference to elderly genitalia.

Last month, I read Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage, a short story collection that explores relationships, love, and identity, with a surreal, grotesque flavor (a woman after my own heart). As I try to explain what femme friendship has meant to me these past few months, I keep returning to the collection’s first story, “Los Angeles.”

The narrator opens by describing her LA home and its curious inhabitants:

The house in which we live has three wings. The west wing is where the Husband and I live. The east wing is where the children and their attending au pairs live. And lastly, the largest but ugliest wing, extending behind the house like a gnarled, broken arm, is where my 100 ex-boyfriends live.

When I first read this paragraph, my inner literalist got the better of me: How does someone have 100 ex-boyfriends? How do they survive to tell the tale? The narrator goes on to describe how she and her 100 ex-boyfriends hang out every day, packed into her Porsche as if it were a clown car. They drive around LA, helping themselves to overpriced health foods and spa treatments. Over time, though, the ex-boyfriends leave.

There are 99 ex-boyfriends. Then 59. Then 29. Then 9. They move out. They get jobs. They get married. . . . The remaining ex-boyfriends stay put, but sheepishly, as if they’re not supposed to be here. . . . With each and every passing year, the back wing shrinks and shrivels up, an old man’s balls gradually retracting into his body.

When I finally open up the back wing, it smells like a mildewed church basement. The AC is still running at full blast, has been running for years. I turn it off. I walk around, coughing on the dust clouds, opening windows, flipping wall switches. The light bulbs have burned out, save for a flickering kitchen ceiling light. In the living room, I empty out ashtrays overflowing with years of debris: cigarette butts, a bus pass, a casino chip. I dust empty bookshelves. In the hall closet, I find an old vaccuum and begin vacuuming the bedrooms, opening the doors one by one as I go along.

Two weeks ago, the divorce from my partner of nearly 8 years was finalized. We stood in front of a middle-aged judge, confirmed that our relationship was irretrievably broken (yes, they make you do that), and shuffled back out to the waiting room. My ex and I briefly discussed the halftime show—no court could divorce us from a flare-denimed man with a diss track in his heart. I belted backup to Cynthia’s “Defying Gravity” in my car and safely returned to the one-wingéd home we’re selling, the house I bought, in part, to feel more married, to feel like everyone else.

But y’all, today’s newsletter is not about divorce, nor will the others be in my triad on love. This newsletter is about friendship.

I don’t know what it feels like to have 100 ex-boyfriends (600 crushes, yes), but damn, do I feel like I have 100 best girlfriends. New friends, old friends, blood and nonblood relatives, coworkers, former coworkers (iykyk), college peers, fellow divorcées from Facebook Marketplace—it feels like friends are coming out from the walls, filling in the space around me. And no, I don’t literally have 100 überclose friends, but there’s something so expansive about women’s love for their friends—it multiplies, compounds on itself. I feel it with me all the time. (No, this isn’t a coming-out post. And so what if it was!)

And this isn’t me trying to say, BOYS BAD SMELLY YUCK GIRLS GOOD, though there is a case to be made for packing your past romances into a separate wing, or in this economy, a drawer. But I think it’s a mistake to treat friendship as something distinct from marriage, from romance, as if it were a consolation prize for the unattached. Femme friendship is not a wing—it’s the whole damn house. And you bet your ass there’s crown molding, bay windows, built-in bookcases, sumptuous textiles, and not a single overhead light on. And it always smells better than a mildewed church basement.

I love the song “Sparks Fly” by the indie/Americana band Waxahatchee, an anthem for platonic/sisterly love:

I take it back, I was never alone
My censored thoughts, mild and monotone
I took a train to Berlin today
When I called last night you felt so far away

Tonight I'll laugh, I say whatever I want
Stay in the bar 'til the sun comes up
And I see myself through my sister's eyes
I'm raw like wire, electrified

If love is to feel seen, to feel sparks, to feel comfortable in one’s skin, friends are the greatest lovers one can have in this life. And I’m in love, deeply.

loch ness

• Friendship goals. I saw this two months ago and have not stopped thinking about it. Frenetic, neurotic, theatrical—what more could a woman ask for?

• The Mindy Project, Season 2, Episode 8. So many TV shows that focus on finding true love are actually so great because they tell the story of a friend group—think New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Sex and The City, etc. In the aforementioned episode, Mindy’s friends go above and beyond to boost her love life—and wildly miss the mark.

• Derry Girls. Obviously.