Are We All Just Mean Girls?
I was putting on my hiking shoes one Saturday morning, preparing to take my eager eleven-month-old puppy on a trail run, when the phone rang. I find it jarring when someone calls, to be honest. Texting has all but eliminated the need for real conversations unless they are juicy or require workshopping. However, this time I picked up, happy to see it was my close friend on the caller ID. She was one of those people I text with daily, sometimes multiple times a day; a friendship formed in adulthood, just post-pandemic, when we were all so thrilled to be around one another again. She rarely called, so I was pleasantly surprised. We shot the shit for a while; you know the drill: I feel like a terrible mom, I’m sore from yesterday’s workout. And then:
“So did you get a sitter for Amelia’s* birthday party Saturday night?” She asked. Amelia’s birthday party. I searched my brain for the invitation I forgot to respond to, or the text I had skipped over, but my mind drew a blank. I felt that sinking feeling, something between being punched in the chest and your guts falling out of your bottom.
“I don’t think I’m invited to Amelia’s party,” I said flatly.
Amelia. We were friends. Good friends. Weren’t we?
At the beginning of the pandemic, I moved to a small community in the mountains of Southern California. Because of our unique geography, it feels like a portal into another world, one far from the cookie-cutter sameness of surrounding suburbia but close enough to city life that we aren’t rural. It’s a town of roughly 18,000 residents, an eclectic mix of artists, actors, entrepreneurs, and hipsters who aspire to be hippies. It’s a place where our lives intertwine between the single public school and the seemingly endless array of community events. A place where everyone nearly knows everyone else, and we are all bouncing from one kid’s party to the next.
It has all the makings of a small town, good and bad. Friendly, safe, and lacking any personal anonymity. Some people who live here keep to themselves, but others like myself go all in. As soon as the pandemic began to lift and people were socializing, I grabbed four of my new friends and assembled a girl group. Naturally, we legitimized it with a group chat and named it: The Witches.
At first, it was bliss, women supporting one another through parenthood, perimenopause, marriages, and careers. For two years, we attended the same parties, took trips, raised our kids, did life together, and soon enough, the cracks began to show. As Tisdale pointed out in her article for The Cut, in most girl-group dynamics, alliances began to form, individual personalities and roles began to play out, and the occasional side comment, side-eye, or side-gossip soon turned into each member of the group talking about the others at some point or another. That’s the funny thing about gossip and venting, it’s contagious, much more so than sharing positive news; the reason being, it’s way more relatable.
Now, an exceptionally charged political environment in this country did not make things better. Suddenly, the gossip and bad mouthing turned up a notch, and the group began to slowly implode. I was the first to dissent by confronting the “witch” I was originally closest to. When I caught wind of some of the things she was saying about me, I was crushed. My nostalgia for our original friendship, coupled with a bruised ego, got the best of me, and I committed the ultimate act of girl drama: I confronted the issue head-on…and wrote her a letter.
Most forty-something girl dynamics function more comfortably in a state of go along to get along, and if you have something to say, say it behind her back. Along with Tisdale’s viral article, Season 3 of White Lotus captured this perfectly, and there is a reason we all loved the girl group plot line more than any other. We saw ourselves in those women. One of them, all of them, it didn’t matter; we felt seen, and we also felt exposed. We are, after all, a generation of Gen Xers and Millennials. Most of us were not modelled on a healthy dynamic of conflict resolution.
The news of my letter spread quickly within the group, and although it was just between my friend and me, I quickly became the pariah. Suddenly, the group chat ran cold, my invite to the birthday was somehow lost, and I was left out in the cold.
After a decent amount of tears and some heavy introspection, I realized a few things. Although I seemed to confront the issue with my friend “head-on,” I did so in a letter rather than in person. Most regrettably, I led with assumptions instead of curiosity. Not only was I not a victim in all of this, but I had contributed to some of the dynamics myself. I had spoken about her at some point when our politics didn’t align, and I had taken things personally that perhaps I shouldn’t have. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, I had put a lot of energy into this group of women, even though there were clear signs indicating they probably weren’t as good of friends as I had led myself to believe.
Amelia, for example, had never given me any reason to think we were close friends. We were on a group chat for years, sure, but it was always me calling her, texting her, inviting her; it didn’t really go both ways, but I just figured she was shy. The friend I wrote the letter to had started quietly quitting our friendship after I was gone for some time on a sabbatical, especially when I became vocally political. The others were a mixed bag, but each had their own sets of judgements, all of which went both ways.
If I’m being honest with myself, I saw what I wanted to see. We had some great times, a bunch of laughs, but at the end of the day, a real friendship could have withstood these hiccups. That’s the true test. Can you go months without seeing one another and still catch up as if no time had passed? Can you respectfully disagree, express vulnerability, and still be friends after? While two years may seem substantial, time does not equal loyalty. Lessons learned: Don’t put more stock into a friendship than you are getting out of it, and if your friends talk about others, they are most likely talking about you, too.
The urge to talk about others in a negative light is compulsory. It’s called triangulation and really goes back to our need to belong. Belonging, after all, is primal. Our ancestors survived war, famine, and financial destitution by belonging to a tribe, a community, a family. It can also be argued that belonging does not exist without exclusion. We are always looking for like-minded people, and the easiest way to find someone who thinks like you is to exclude those who don’t.
As a child of immigrants, I experienced othering throughout my adolescence. My parents had heavy Eastern European accents and tried their best to keep me away from most television, movies, and other American cultural references. Even though I didn’t look “different” in the predominantly white town I grew up in, I always felt different, and the mean girls of my local junior high sensed it like sharks in chummy waters. Regardless of the fact I am now a grown woman and no longer a pre-teen with alternating turquoise and purple braces, when I got the news I was not invited to Amelia’s party, it took me less than 2 seconds to feel like I was right back at Goleta Valley Junior High when Allie Vaughn created a burn book and wrote I cry over spilt milk. I wish I could say I reacted gracefully to this entire experience, even as a grown woman, but I did not. I cried over that spilt milk and crumbled.
All any of us want is to belong, to feel normal, appreciated, and accepted. What we have to remember over and over is that how others perceive us is mostly out of our control. It doesn’t mean that it won’t ever affect us, but if we could all let go of that false sense of power, we would be happier for it. Mel Robbins's breakthrough book “Let Them” addresses this point directly. She writes, “Stop wasting your energy trying to control or change other people. Let them show you who they really are, and then YOU can choose what you do next.” We as women can at least try to do better. We can try to belong without othering, and we can certainly chill on the gossiping. Spill the tea, but make it good tea, sweet, with a side of nice.
Belonging has a body count. Do any of the mean girl personas resonate?
The Queen Bee
This mean girl is usually a master connector. She knows everyone and their secrets, and she gossips subtly. She might drop a hint of inside info casually, as if it’s something everyone already knows. She loves to stir the pot but then quickly steps away to avoid the perception of being the instigator. Most people work hard to stay on her good side out of fear of the drama that will befall them if they don’t.
The Complacent Peacekeeper
Most subtle of all the mean girls, this friend is always nice, avoids drama, and often plays the role of peacekeeper. She doesn’t start the gossip; however, she also doesn’t stand up for anyone directly or shut down negative commentary. She goes along with whatever is being said by whomever in the moment.
The Social Climber
This friend isn’t actually close to anyone; she is simply interested in the relationship that will help her the most in her career and social circles. Privately, she is often perpetually negative and spends a lot of time talking about others, while socially, she behaves like a beacon of positivity and fun.
The Gossip
“Have you heard?” It’s the way this friend begins most of her sentences. She loves gossip; she lives, breathes, and thrives on it in a way so compulsive it feels like second nature. She might not have bad intentions, but most of her conversations revolve around other people’s news, and there isn’t much substance to the friendship. You look forward to seeing her because good gossip sometimes feels like dessert, but, like dessert, it can leave you feeling worse after indulging.
*names have been changed.