Last weekend, I went through the twenty-something rite of passage of attending my first school friend's hen do. It was quite the heart warming female bonding session as we celebrated the new life of one of my oldest friends - even if it was surreal to think of her becoming a WIFE. Hold on, was this the same girl that I have spent the last 12 years with, copying each other's homework, crying down the phone about boys and enduring each other's questionable haircuts? A W.I.F.E. Serious grown up territory.
Aged 14...
And aged 24, preparing for Amanda's hen do!
Over the course of the weekend, I got to thinking (as you do after an Absinthe cocktail or two) about the extreme depth of female friendship. I defy the stereotyped idea of women gossiping inane nonsense; yes, we can chat, but we also trust our closest friends with our hopes, problems, ideas. Sometimes, however, female friendships are a very weird, very specific experience. I'm not talking about the deep rooted friendships that feel more like family ties, but the strange bonds girls make when they are young and impressionable (or rather, more young and impressionable than we still are in our twenties...!)
These all-consuming, intense bonds are formed when teenage girls are at their most awkward age (anyone fancy going back there? yeah, me neither.) Friendships instantly created, that are composed of an unbreakable bond of trust, to the point where they feel more like a relationship than a friendship. Sometimes, these unions transcend to the levels of long term pal-hood, but frequently they implode when one person does something to break the bond. There's a fine line...and all that. They are the supernovas of the friendship world; blindingly brilliant but gone in a flash. A little bit like the career of a certain Ms Lohan, who starred in possibly the greatest movie about teenage girls OF ALL TIME.
Mean Girls: "I know, right?"
I had a couple of these experiences when I was younger; you make a new BFF and want to hang out with them All The Time. Then we would fall out (sometimes over a boy, more often because one of us grew out of the friendships just as quickly as we had fallen into them.) It's a very strange thing.
Speaking of weirdly intense friendships, was anyone else traumatised by Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures? I sneakily watched it on my own when I was about 13, and it spooked the life out of me.
These were the days when Peter Jackson made films about actual people rather than hobbits chasing after rings, and he wrote the screenplay with his wife Fran Walsh, basing it on the true story of a murder committed by a pair of teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand. It also stars a then unknown little actress named Kate Winslet, making her movie debut.
The unsettling story of the two girls, who form a freakishly intense friendship, has stayed with me for a long time. Their lives become completely intertwined, to the point where their imaginations take them to made-up worlds and they become characters in their own fantasy. The dangerous fanaticism that exists between them drives them together and pushes reality out, with one horrifying consequence.
(On a side note, Kate's acting is pure drama school class and the 1950s costumes probably set me on a vintage tangent for the rest of my life.)
Another equally weird movie that documents the unique female bond is Thirteen, directed by Catherine Hardwicke (aka the original and best of the Twilight directors), starring Nikki Reed before she got all sparkly as Rosalie Cullen, and Evan Rachel Wood, before she became a homewrecking Dita von Teese wannabe.
Thirteen gets me right there because it represents how much your friends influence you as you become a weird half-child, half-adult hybrid, and how important they are as we turn running and screaming away from our families (otherwise known as the 'Kevin' phase.) However, I defy any girl/woman to not cry at the moment that the mother intervenes and forces a hug on her otherwise feral daughter, causing her to slump to the ground in one big emotional mess. She also knocks over a box of cornflakes in the process, which in my household, would have instantly killed the emotional epiphany as my Mum went off to get a dustpan and brush.
So there you have it boys; a leetle insight into the unique female experience. Thankfully, not all our friendships culminate in murder, jail time or a drugs intervention, but girls do know how to do friendship better than anyone. And as for my best buddies, I hope we'll still be celebrating knowing each other when we are 34, 44, 54... (not that we'll ever actually be that old, obviously)
