Monday, 07 March 2011

• What I Love About Women

  
  I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not good at being a girl. For most of middle and high school, I was never really friends with women. I never got “female camaraderie,” or even how to talk to girls. I was just as clueless as most of my partially nerdy guy friends on how to approach these creatures. And it seemed in this world where you’re either “Girly,” or a “tom-boy,” my best attempts made both sides frown.

  Needless to say, the female friends I did make were gutsy, weird, and much more brash than our typical female counterparts. On the outside, you wouldn’t know we were any different than other girls. We went out to dinner, we got our nails done, we celebrated prom dress shopping and we always cried over boys.

  Recently, I was in the nail salon and the place was packed with both young and older women. I started to fade in and out of everyone’s conversations mulling over my own life but what I did hear caught my attention. Two young girls over pedicures discussed the complexities of boys and what they didn’t understand about them.

  I felt a sad pang thinking it would take years, sometimes even a lifetime, to get the answers they were seeking. But no different than the sixteen-year-olds were the women sitting parallel discussing their husbands, their recent flings, or the needy/creepy guy who won’t stop calling. Basically, all the woes, joys, and mysteries that the male race brings to us. For the first time in my life, something clicked in me being around these women.

  All women, admittedly or not, feel uncomfortable around one another. We know how the others think, that we are more susceptible to judge one another and wound one another with our bitchiness. Let’s face it, women are scary. But the one thing that always seems to fill out the awkwardness between women, are men.

  Turning twenty-one, I realized my relationship problems had finally hit a parallel with every other woman. We were now all dating the same complicated men and dealing with the same roulette of issues. The popular girls from high school who I could never see myself talking to, suddenly shared many of the same emotions as me. Girls who are broken-hearted or who have been stepped on by a man can become best friends based on this alone. It’s a miraculous unity, women trying to understand the male race.

  But just as the boys and men who’ve hurt us, we’re flawed too. We stab each other in the back. We become “frenemys,” we call each other sluts and steal each other’s boyfriends. It’s funny how the one thing we usually fight over, is the same thing that brings us closer.

  Despite all of this, what I love most about women, when push comes to shove, is that  women are always well equipped to be instant best friends, confidants, and defenders. It’s their flawless ability to drop their walls or their cool bitch attitude to stand up for one another or insert advice when it’s most needed.

  Women are the ones who hand you tissues when you realize in horror that your stall is tapped out. Women are the ones who not only hold, but braid back your hair at parties when you’re retching up your guts. Women are the people they tell you to first approach when you’re lost as a kid.

  Women will compliment your shoes, your hair, your new dress; these micro details we strive to perfect before leaving the house. Women are our mothers, our sisters, our gym buddies, our best friends. So why is it, as women, we don’t always give them credit? With all the things we’re capable of doing when we’re together and unified. (Remember the women’s suffrage movement?) Think of all the endless possibilities we could accomplish if we could do that today. 

  So tell me readers, do you ever feel uncomfortable around women? Do you find yourself friends with men more often? And what do YOU love most about women?

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