#11: Are you living up to your fictional counterpart?
Romantic friendships, magical girls, and buying back into cliches.
pov: friends to lovers. listen while reading for best experience.
Are you living up to your fictional counterpart?
Happy belated National Best Friends Day! This week, we’re asking ourselves: Are we living up to the friendships we see on TV? Is the pursuit of cinematic BFF-dom noble or futile? Rambling, reminiscing, and emotions ensue. 🌙 🤏
K: It always surprises people when Cam and I mention that, really, we’ve only been close friends for about a year and a half.
Overwhelmingly, mutual friends who aren’t aware of our history will mistake us for childhood best friends. Aside from the itch-to-be-perceived that gets scratched each time I hear that, I’ve been wondering lately: What exactly is it about us?
Camille is my best friend. I don’t know why, but I still get so nervous when I say that out loud. It took me, literally, two years and nothing short of Cam going through a devastating personal crisis to say the words “I love you” to her for the first time. It’s funny—even though our connection is palpably intimate to others on the outside looking in (“It’s like you’ve known each other forever!”), we are still actively fumbling around and trying to communicate our feelings to one another in a way that doesn’t scare the shit out of us. Me, especially. I have an incredibly hard time expressing my emotions, to the point where it can cause spells of anxiety and a lot of unnecessary pain/embarrassment/tears, so I’m very grateful to Cam for being able to meet me in the middle of all that turmoil. I want Cam to like me. I want to put my best foot forward at all times. And maybe that’s just what’s it about the one seventy girls: we take our friendship seriously.
In a culture that no longer separates intimacy from sex and de-ritualizes friendship to such an extent that it’s lost much of its social preeminence, it feels eccentric to admit that I’ve wanted a best friend more than I’ve ever wanted a boyfriend. There are plenty of ways you could pathologize that (the dad thing! the gay thing! the sexual trauma thing!) but, plainly, having a good friend is like a superpower to me, a protective spell, something wrapped up in the reverent language of Veronese lovers. You complete me. I’ve been waiting my whole life for you. Loving someone should be the least problematic thing in the world, so why does it feel wrong—even kind of perverted—to say those things to a straight female friend?
The idea of romantic friendship has been retroactively applied in historical scholarship to describe “a very close, [non-sexual] relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when there was not a social category of homosexuality.” These friendships were unremarkable until the mid-19th century, around when “physical intimacy between non-sexual partners came to be regarded with anxiety,” and are considerably less common today. I appreciate the alternative framework romantic friendships suggest: that you can build your emotional life around something other than (or in equal addition to) spousal love, and that it’s not a crime to equally value and put effort into both these sorts of relationships. If the magical girl shows I grew up watching were anything to go off of, life exploded into perfect technicolor the instant you found true female friendship—it was that big, that important.
Come to think of it, much of how I view and operate within my close friendships have been shaped by this subgenre. I was besotted with what female friendship seemed to promise in shows like Sailor Moon or Winx Club: endless fun, instantaneous beautification, exotic talking pets (??), immunity from isolation, and a newfound sense of purpose. Here were ordinary girls, on-their-own girls, nothing-special girls, who, through their mutual discovery of one another, became extraordinary. I watched these girls search for one another, band together in the face of exaggerated evil, devote their lives to protecting one another—and I learned.
In elementary school, I made increasingly outrageous attempts to find (and eventually, enterprising girlboss that I am, straight-up engineer) my own entourage of BFFs. I pushed my friends together at birthday parties in the hopes they’d get along, critically evaluated new girls who transferred to our class as potential initiates, and enforced Regina-George-esque dress codes so we would each have a “signature look.” By designing, primping, and packaging my very own lab-grown Plastics clique, I perhaps believed an epiphanic space would be cleared for me, too, and I’d unlock some great secret of the universe, chose and be chosen, belong to something, be ensorcelled and absorbed into a force greater than myself. Mostly, I was hoping I’d be a little less lonely.
E: I used to think I was better at relationships than at friendships.
While friendships need to be cultivated and cherished over time, relationships could spring up at any moment. Texting under the covers all night, smuggling notes back and forth in class, an extra “y” at the end of “heyyy,” skipping class to meet up behind the restroom with our little hall passes. The escalation from stranger to something more gave me butterflies every time. Of course, I didn’t know then, that relationships at 13 is more like a best friend now. It was the same undivided attention, same magical bubble only the two of you share.
In truth, I didn’t have that many friends growing up and let go of my dream of having a BFF pretty early on. With my family’s moving back and forth between China and America, it was hard to pour into a friendship, only to watch their replies get shorter and shorter and one day stop arriving at all. Friend groups were much easier to come by. Having a “squad” served its social purpose—homecoming groups, club meetings, group chats, birthday-invite lists. Each person seems to naturally fulfill a certain role. The mom friend. The clumsy one that others pick on. The smart one. The artsy one (me).
I met Kelly our freshman year, when we were still both in our respective friend groups. And I had my boyfriend, who I treated as my best friend. For the year that Kelly and I were roommates, we carefully tiptoed around each other: I helped choose the color of her Hydroflask, she left pieces of Bark Thins on my desk. I like to think we saved the getting to know each other part for last.
Looking at our old photos, it’s easy to see parallels of our friendship in the shows I love to watch but once passed off as unattainable. And I wonder if I inadvertently manifested our friendship by watching one too many sitcom reruns. Was it really all that spontaneous, fated, written in the stars? Are we feigning Blair and Serena, or are Serena and Blair modeled after us?
The secret to a friendship is more intuitive than you’d think. Sure, I can name the qualities I admire in my closest friends: dependable, non-judgemental, empathetic, emotionally open. But I can’t tell you exactly what drew me to DM Kelly out of all the girls on UT’s roommate page, or how many makeshift alien photoshoots and side projects we needed to collaborate on before we called each other best friends. For a lack of a better word, it just feels right to be with her anywhere in the world—I think we knew this from the day we met, we’ve just gotten better at naming it over time.
I often forget that life inspires art, and media portrays reality. Not the other way around, at least not at ground zero. So it is somewhat backwards to want to live up to your fictional character when they’re really written by and about people like you. In retrospect, reducing friendship to several TV characters limits the capacity of life to surprise you.
I could have never imagined that Kelly and I could make a September night feel like summer again when all we did was sit and talk in that sketchy alley outside my apartment building. We could be six feet apart in front of her door, me squatting against the wall, to see each other one last time before school’s end, and I wouldn’t want to say goodbye any other way. We could be on the steps of the UT fountain, lost on a surprisingly hard hike up to the Hollywood sign and yes, we could be at the back door of Moore Hill watching Austin’s first snow that winter. We used to joke that we only hang out with each other because, well, when you feel that way with someone, why would you choose to be with anyone else?
We’ve since expanded our circles, but she raised my standard for relationships by far. I’m more sure of what I want now: To be understood. To feel larger than life. To be with someone who makes you appreciate the scenes you love so much a little more. You know it’s good when you start believing in cliches, and maybe they were real all along. The screenwriters were just a bit ahead of you.
Our brilliant friend
E: Laura, for being the new EIC of The Haley Classical Journal!!! Always knew you were up to something when I sat behind you in AP Euro. <3 Also, for spending the weekend with me in New York. I love you!