I recently read a book called Everything I Know about Love. This book shares multiple stories of the author’s life. She goes into depth about how much love means to her and all the different types of love. A massive part of this “love” she was describing was the love embodied in female friendships.
I spent a lot of time dwelling on the concept of female friendship, love, and how many women long to have this relationship with other women. We all want a “soulmate,” or a “person.” I had the idea that maybe we were longing for the wrong thing. We should be longing to enjoy the unique phenomenon of girlhood and femininity and not focus on these friendships.
Most women can agree when I say that the feeling of girlhood is unmatched. Nothing will ever compare to painting your nails when you were three, feeling like you are the most grown-up person in the entire world, to getting your ears pierced when you were seven so you could get a sliver of confidence back after girls were mean to you at lunch, or dancing in your pajamas when you were 15 after a boy made you cry for something you can’t seem to remember, while you are screaming Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” at the top of your lungs. Girlhood does not stop when you become a woman. It keeps going, from getting your princess wedding to getting a promotion in a male-dominated field to holding your newborn baby in the hospital for the first time. Although these are not things I have experienced in my lifetime so far, I look forward to having these moments.
Girlhood is not just having enhancing experiences that make life worth living. It is also being victimized by the patriarchal society that we live in. Ask any woman if they have ever been cat-called, or shamed because they didn’t want to be a mom. What makes this so beautiful is how many of us unify against the old school of thought and fight against it. The same way women fought for our right to vote years ago is how we fight daily to be girls together. Last year, women had a big breakthrough when Greta Gerwig’s 2023 hit movie Barbie came out. I remember seeing women of all ages going to watch it—all wearing pink and exerting that even though the transition from girlhood to womanhood is torture, it also is beautiful.
When I watched the Barbie movie, I learned that many women were with their “people” and their “soulmates.” I will admit I was with mine, too. I didn’t realize at that moment that female friendships were not what made this beautiful, but they were how it united us all together. The friendships we made there are what’s important. I became friends with a group of breathtakingly gorgeous sixty-year-old women, simply because I smiled at them. I became friends with a five-year-old when I told her she looked beautiful in her pink tutu, and with all the sixteen-year-old girls around me when we all cried, realizing the true importance of girlhood.
So, to girlhood: you will always be special to me. Being a girl is my favorite part of having air fill my lungs. Never have I questioned whether I was meant to be a girl. Even when I start my fearsome transition into womanhood, I know deep down inside I will always be the three-year-old girl getting her nails painted, the seven-year-old girl getting her ears pierced to get confidence back, and the fifteen-year-old girl dancing in her room. I will strive for the beauty of womanhood, motherhood, and aging but will hold on to my past.
