A Girl's Best Friend?

A girl's best friend is not a diamond. It's a guy. And I don't mean the guy who buys her the diamond - although he's not so bad for sure. I mean guys very often make better friends than girls.

This is by no means the first time I find myself thinking this. Or hearing it from another girlfriend. Or reading it in some chicklit book. Girls say this all the time. That guys value friendship more than girls. That a guy will not easily sell his friends out for a girl while a girl would quite often give up her friends or sell them out for the man in her life. That girls get jealous of each other, gossip about each other etc....

Yesterday a group of girls I know came over to see me. We're talking about 12 girls or so here. Lots of different nationalities - about the same age as me give or take a couple of years. And what do we all have in common? We were neighbors for about 10 years. That was when we were little of course. After that we kept in touch. Maybe not as often as we might have but still, you could say we're all pretty old friends.

During the course of said visit - I notice that everyone present was being exceptionally catty to one girl - let's call her Amal. In that cloyingly sweet manner that girls have. Pointed, poisonous barbs delivered with smiles & sentences ending with 'honey' & 'sweetie'. But she was being bullied beyond all my attempts to keep the situation under control, change the subject, steer the conversation away from her etc...I really felt I should put a stop to it because the girl was after all in my house but something was clearly very wrong. You could almost touch the bitterness in the air.

Amal eventually left. And I let the rest of them have a piece of my mind. I was so angry. They kept telling me to cool down, that I have to listen to their side of the story etc.....In time though I did. And I said ok I'm listening.

The story mainly belongs to another girl in the group - let's call this one Mona. So Mona is in love with this guy Khalid that she had been dating for 5 years but they couldn't get married because his family disapproved of her for not being conservative enough etc.....Amal was Mona's best friend at the time. Mona set Amal up with Khalid's brother. Amal is apparently conservative enough for the family & so she & the brother are married now.

So what's the problem? Mona has recently come to find out that Amal never took her side in family discussions, that she always told stories aimed at turning her husband's parents against Mona. Infact Amal & her husband are now the biggest opposition within the family to Mona's marriage to Khalid.

Then there were other stories - stories about how jealous Amal always was of Mona, how she caused her problems at work, how she always talked about her & most of all, how she did all that behind Mona's back while seeing Mona practically everyday & pretending to be her best friend in the world.

It's not the details of the story that interest me. It's this undercurrent of jealousy & ill-will. The assumption they all seemed to have that because Mona comes from a somewhat richer family than Amal's the two of them must be rivals. Or that Amal would try to make herself look even more conservative to her in-laws by pretending to disapprove of her friend. And then the way Mona doesn't confront Amal with what she found out, that instead she would keep up the pretence of friendship while turning everyone else in the group against Amal so that they all still hang out together while secretly hating each other.

In the course of the conversation, other ideas came to the surface, everyone seemed to be blaming Mona for even letting Amal know that she has a bf, let alone allowing her to meet his family & marry his bro. They were all saying that a girl should never trust her gf's around her man. And lots of stories about cases where they were all bitten by gf's stealing their bf's or trying to hit on their husbands or fiances etc.....& how they all learnt their lesson now etc...

I was just staring, wondering if they all realized that effectively they were saying they don't trust each other around men. And if this a normal confession between so-called 'friends'. And if I should really have the lot of them in my house around my husband!

Gradually as they began to leave, I started to hear negative things about each girl as soon as she left from the ones who were left behind. In the end they all looked so petty & small to me that I didn't know any longer who is the villain of the piece & who to feel sorry for.

I found their visit very disturbing. They all heard about my wedding pretty late & have been trying to organize this visit for a while to offer me belated congrats & give me a wedding present. I was touched & flattered when they came in but by the time they left I was wishing I could tell them to take their present away & never come back because I never want to see any of them again. I told them I can't help wondering what you will all say about me when my back is turned.I meant it but they chose to take it as a joke. Or pretended to anyway.

The thing is, this is not the first group of girlfriends I've seen disintegrate over the same sort of thing. This is at least the 3rd time I've seen it happen. And I've never been in or witnessed the same sort of situation with guys.

Of course male friends have other problems. If he is not someone you grew up with or a family friend or something then in the beginning he will almost always try to get you to sleep with him. They just have to try their luck there. When that fails there's a really nasty type of guy who will try to use you to show off to his friends that he know girls & make everyone think he is sleeping with you. But most guys I've met were of the type who won't do that, will get over the fact that you are not going to be his next one night stand & make a pretty decent friend.

All in all I find that with guys you need to be careful at first just until you've trained them to recognize your boundaries but you can pretty much relax later. The friendship settles into a pattern & they don't do anything too unpredictable.

With girls it's like it's the other way around, the closer they get to you, the more they know about you, the more you need to be careful because they can always surprise you. Sometimes in pleasant ways. And sometimes not.

posted by LouLou