Friendship Wars

What I was most struck by in what we learned in these last few weeks was about friendships in adolescence. I tried to find journal entries to coincide with this time period for myself but there were fewer than I expected, primarily because I very rarely wrote about my female friends except in passing. My journals are primarily consumed with boys. Male friends, boyfriends, whatever whirlwind of attention I was a part of.

However, I think one of the more interesting things that we've talked about in conjunction with adolescence is this idea that it is a time when you are trying on new things. For the first time you are really getting to try to work out your social skills in ways that you never have before, and that can go well or very poorly. Personally it took me a lot of years to figure out how friendship with girls was supposed to work. One of the things I've most been pondering while we've been discussing these issues is how friendships are also something that benefit from modeling. If you don't see your parents or the adults around you in healthy friendships, you probably don't grow up with that knowledge innate.

I did find a journal entry from when I was 12 that I think makes pretty clear how very unaware I was of a lot of the nuances of friendship. It is not really indicative of my later years in adolescence.

Wendesday night I went to a rock concernt with Monica and it was loud. It was literally bouncing off the walls! But it was fun. We had three groups, Grammatrain, Jabba and Adams Apple. I would have been a thouroghly enjoyable evening except I broke up with Monica. I didn't mean to it's just that I was tired and I felt left out because she didn't seem to want me anywhere near her and I didn't, and still don't, understand why. But we broke up and I didn't get a chance to apologize.

Although there's a lot this entry doesn't say, I like that I automatically linked friendship to "breaking up" (we made up like a week later, btw, by me apologizing, which was typical). I think she was embarrassed of me that night, honestly. I was a pretty wide-eyed and socially awkward kid, and she knew other people there and didn't feel comfortable having me around. It was not the first time that happened when I was young, although I wouldn't gain enough self-awareness to get around it for a couple of years.

That said, when I was older, even though I never bother mentioning it in my journals, my relationships with my friends were in constant turmoil. Phone calls that ended in screaming matches and constantly hanging up and calling back, throwing the phone against the closet door. There was a lot of drama, a lot of wrangling to see who could be the person who earned the most attention. One of the things about the article we read about girls engaging in friendship wars, was that to me I feel like there are so many kinds of friendship wars. Whatever the top of the heap looks like can be very different depending on what is most prized in your circle. What is perhaps most interesting is why are girls so socialized to compete against each other in this way?