This may come as a surprise to many of you who know me here, but I've always had a hard time making friends with other women. I'm often more comfortable around men; I get tongue-tied around women, unsure of what to say to them, as if other women are somehow alien. Which is absurd, considering how many of the good friends I have here who are female (um, all of them!) and how well I get along with them, but that fact is helping me work on it. It's also given me some food for thought for this diary.
I didn't even realize it for a long time, until one of my oldest, closest friends (who is male) pointed it out to me. He casually remarked one day about my competitiveness with other women. I had no clue what he was talking about but we've spent a lot of time together and one of the reasons we're such good friends is that we teach each other about ourselves in unexpected ways, so I asked him to elaborate.
"Well, you know," he said, "every time another girl walks into the room, you automatically have to be the center of attention." I was amazed, both that I actually did this and that I didn't recognize it at all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder how I could change that and see these other women as my sisters rather than my enemies.
Now, I can't say that I'm fully reformed even now. But I got to see yesterday just how that awareness and the influence of feminism have helped me.
I don't talk very much at school, preferring instead to keep to myself, but there is one kid in one of my classes this semester that I know from other classes and have had occasion to talk to a couple of times. One day, a girl started to join in our conversation. I basically gave her the cold shoulder at first, until yesterday, when I realized that I was annoyed at the competition she presented.... For the attention of a guy that I don't even like much but merely talk to because I know him. How stupid is that? I thought about it for awhile and resolved to treat her better. If I was going to ignore anyone, I decided, I would ignore him more than her, and maybe I would actually be able to use that comfort around men and competitiveness for their attention to help me include, rather than exclude, this girl. Besides that, she made a point of talking to me after class and she was much more interesting anyway.
But this little event got me thinking (again, because I do think about it fairly often) about the ways in which we women both separate and unite ourselves. I have excluded myself in a lot of ways from female company throughout my life, initially because I disdained it but now because I don't really know how to be any different. It makes me wonder what I have missed and what I don't know, since the rules of interaction amongst women are not necessarily the same as between women and men, or amongst men. Is there really that much difference between the way each gender makes friends or is that a societal (or personal) construct? Is there truly a different quality between friendships with other women or friendships with men? How can women learn to overcome animosity against other women? And to what degree does our own belief about gender effect how we make friends and who with?
What are you experiences, and what do you think?