You know when you had your group of middle school girlfriends and you thought it’s the best because all you do is giggle, act like idiots together, experiment with bangs and thought you were hot shit?
Then you hit high school, you and your girlfriends start driving, maybe you dabble with Parliament Lights because you think it looks cool with your French manicure hanging out the car window and you really think you’ve made it.
In college, with a little independence under your belt, you hit the tanning salon with your girlfriends and bond over playboy bunny stickers on your hip in the tanning bed before heading out for $3 terrible well drinks at 11pm, and you think you must be at the peak of girlhood.
Your 20s get even better as you grow together, experience your first real jobs, clear the racks at Express for work clothes and meet for bagels Sunday morning to cure your hangover (because you still drink cheap well drinks) from the night before.
In your 30s there are usually marriages, babies, divorces, and you feel like full-fledged adults thinking, how can girlfriends get even better than this?
But they do.
Almost everything about my 40s has been better because of the girlfriends in my life going through it with me. I have curated the most incredible gang of badass women who have my back and love me hard, and I them. They held my hand through a tumultuous divorce, making highly inappropriate jokes and commentary to bring much needed levity to a very dark time in my life.
They listened to my stories about dating as a single mom and hyped me up when I did not feel sexy or adequate to be back in the dating pool at all. They showered me with love and joy when I met the love of my life and got remarried in my late 30s. They cried with me when I suffered a soul-crushing miscarriage and felt completely broken and hopeless. They became aunties to my daughters and showed up in every way when I had my second baby two weeks before my 40th birthday.
They have celebrated every birthday, every milestone and every success in my life while also being there to lift me up during the messy parts of adulthood. They have unfiltered conversations about love, sex, marriage, periods, menopause, poop, mammograms, colonoscopies and all things personal. Nothing is off the table.
As you get older, your bonds with girlfriends transition into relationships ripe with vulnerability. Of course, it’s easy to have fun with friends during good times. But the ability of women to understand each other through growth and introspection during middle age is where it’s at in my opinion. If you can find your people, it feels like you are all going through the same shit together.
If you can open up and be authentic, you are met with the same authenticity in return. There’s no judgement. There are no conversations that are off limits. Pettiness is not a thing in these magical little circles. You laugh together, cry together and send each other links for wearable heating pads and period underwear. There is an overflow of relatable memes and TikToks being shuttled back in forth in the group text.
Everyone is getting more comfortable in their skin, and it bleeds into the group. Nobody bats an eye if you talk in detail about all the gross things that happened to your body after eating dairy when you know you shouldn’t. Wherever you go, someone will have a pair of readers in their purse so you can see the dinner menu in the dimly lit restaurant. If you’re sick, they will offer to bring you whatever you need. When you have a conflict, they will pick up your kids from school and even feed them, so you don’t have to worry about dinner. The support is unrivaled.
I have always been a girl’s girl, but in my 40s, it’s so much more than that. My girlfriends are my lifeline, my sounding board, my text proofreaders when I have an argument with someone, my cheerleaders, my truthtellers. I know that regardless of what life throws at me, they will show up because they always do. I hope I give them even a fraction of what they give me.
Keep leaning into your girlfriends and honoring those bonds because it really does make life that much better as you go through life.
I love mine madly and just hope they know it.