in defense of female friendships . . .

So there’s this part of me that’s afraid of friendships with women.

You guys,

I have been so burned before.

Stack one time on top of another, on top of that, and I’m telling you –

I know what the pain of betrayal and broken relationship feels like.

Oh – it’s the bitterest of pills to swallow.

It stings.

It scars.

It stays.

And I have certainly spent my fair share of time avoiding close community with females.

If I am wary,

trust me when I say I have my reasons.

Yes, I am forty-two years old and I’ve got mounds left to learn, but I’ve also learned a little something something.

Women – we need one another.

And, please know I speak from painfully earned experience,

the good is worth the risk.

What I gain is worth it.

I want to say that again —-

It.  Is.  Worth.  It.  

I hate betrayal.  (And I think I hate it with a righteous kind of hate.)

It’s painful and it’s despicable and it’s dark and it’s ugly and it breaks down all the good that two people have worked so hard to gain.

Disloyalty is a badge I refuse to pin on.

But I have also known loyalty and faithfulness and deep deep kindness from the empathetic care of other women in my absolute darkest hours.

And in my lightest moments as well.

Today I sat at my messy kitchen table and I talked to my friends.

I didn’t tidy the table before they came.

We all three sat there in various stages of life and various stages of pain and change and fear.  Physical and emotional and potential and visceral.

Last week I sat talking late late late into the night with a friend I’ve had since middle school.  (Middle school!)

I get texts at the exact right moment from my friends.  And hugs and bars of chocolate and wise words kindly spoken.  I get comical stares and gentle admonishments and I know God made us to live in community that looks and feels like us at our very best – and maybe us at our very worst too.

My friend is moving to another country this weekend and I kind of hate it.  (And not with the righteous kind of hate either.  More like the selfish kind of hate.)

And my circle of friends at the beginning of school last year and at the beginning of school this year looks (and feels) piles different.

There’s been loss.  (Oh my.  So much loss.  Unspeakable and by turns unbearable.)

But there’s been gain too.

The kind of gain that is so lovely and beautiful and achingly God-sent that it hurts a little, right there tight in your ribs, just to talk about it and mostly you find you don’t talk about it because talking about it makes you feel a little high-school-unstable and that never looks good on anyone over the age of twenty and that decade has long since passed.

And so I just want to tell you – despite it all – despite the potential hurt and the possible betrayal and the gigantic risk you place yourself under when you make a new friend or embrace an old friend,

I still think friendship is worth it.