A strong female bond can feel like the first laugh after a bout of crying — raw and vulnerable, healing and warm, and charmingly messy. My entire life, as well as the lives of every woman I know, has been coloured by female friendship, the best and worst of it alike.
Enter the sacred bathroom floor cry.
In university, in the middle of a ballet class, my friend left the studio in tears. We had been attached at the hip since the first week of orientation and now, in the final weeks of our degree, had experienced an entire phase of our lives together. After barre, the professor asked if I could go check on her. As I walked into the bathroom, there she was, pink tights, hair in a bun, with her ballet shoes still on, crying face-down on the bathroom floor. She and her boyfriend had just broken up. Naturally, I (also in my tights and ballet shoes) slid down the wall and plopped down directly beside her. She cried over him and I cried over her — my funny, sweet friend. We sat on the bathroom floor for what felt like hours, trying to put the pieces back together.
Two years later, my two childhood friends came to visit me in the city and we went out for dinner. Carried away, laughing about our years as competition dancers, my friend noticed her period had started. “I think there’s a strong chance I bled through my skirt,” she said half laughing, half crying, with a dark red stain in the shape of Europe at the back of her pastel blue skirt. Naturally, we walked to the bathroom in a huddle, me at the front and my friend behind her to block her from all angles. We huddled in the bathroom, using an entire roll of toilet paper to dab away the stain, then returned to our table like nothing had happened.
These moments (parts of an endless, heartfelt catalogue) reveal just how limitless the intimacy and vulnerability of female friendships can be. They form the ground beneath us, catching us when we fall, and provide a shoulder to cry on (even when we’re still in our ballet shoes). It feels almost as though we are held together by external forces, as if women are simply built to find one another, and to stay near.
As it turns out, we absolutely are.
Female friendships are rooted not only in emotion, but also in history and biology.
Documentation of female friendship in the first 2000 years of Western society is scarce. Women were often closed off from the rest of the world. Still, we can assume that where women gathered — in monasteries or small communities while men were hunting — bonds were quietly formed. As time progressed, so did the evolution of these bonds. As wives moved away from their mothers and sisters after marrying, the forming of friendships became essential for survival. In 1693, feminist philosopher Mary Astell wrote one of the first declarations on the importance of female friendship. As an unmarried 17th-century woman, she described it as one of the “brightest virtues” and noted that it supported moral development for all women.
What struck me most in Astell’s discussion was her feeling a “strong propensity to friendly love.” As if it was programmed within her to connect deeply with other women.
I, over 300 years later, feel the same way.
As I coached my young friend through putting a tampon in for the first time from the other side of the bathroom stall door, I realized my own propensity for friendly love.
Aside from the circumstantial and evolutionary factors that have led to our continued closeness through the centuries, female physiology plays a large part. When women are under stress, they release oxytocin, known as the “love hormone” (in contrast to men who release testosterone). This release in oxytocin encourages women to seek social support and close connections as a form of protection. This behaviour, known as “tend and befriend,” contrasts with the more commonly used “fight or flight,” highlighting a woman’s natural instinct to draw closer to others.
Perhaps it is this closeness, this innate physiological and emotional bond, that makes a female friendship breakup among the most difficult things to endure. It is the heart-wrenching counterpart to the beautiful depth and connection. If a friendship can be so intrinsically bound, then naturally a breakup is unbearable. While these breakups can be a result of many different circumstances — betrayal, disagreements, life changes — perhaps the most common is what The New York Times refers to as “the ambiguous slow fade.”
“The Ambiguous Slow Fade”
Unlike romantic or familial relationships, female friendships are not bound to anything. There is no timeline, courthouse document signing, yearly reunion, or obligation to put up with their controversial opinions. It is simply a choice. Often times, a choice that we assume will last a lifetime.
And yet, as life progresses, external factors make this continued choice difficult. We move cities, find partners, get married, have children (or don’t), and eventually become enveloped in the new world we live in, instead of the many worlds that got us there in the first place. Friendships fade, often without closure or explanation, leaving a gaping void. In many cases, we don’t realize the true value of female friendships until they are gone. As time passes, texts are left unopened, dinner plans are flaked on, and the emotional intimacy once shared is reduced to only the space between. Grieving a relationship that was once an epicentre for comfort, support, and acceptance can last a lifetime.
Still, we grieve their loss because they mattered so deeply. We carry traces of these friendships with us, allowing them to shape the women we are becoming, as we continue to build our own “female huddle.”
As my mom — whose network of friends spans decades and thousands of kilometres — told me in the midst of my own friendship parting, “The catch with female friendships is that they can’t work if they’re one-sided. But putting in the effort, for your current friendships or for new ones, is important. I think it would be hard for women to survive without friends,” she told me. “Every woman needs another woman to lean on — to remind you that you’re not crazy. We are so much luckier than men.”
So here’s to female friendship.
To ripping your Kleenex into small pieces in the bathroom line because there isn’t enough toilet paper (there never is).
To opening the results of an STI test together.
To cursing the ground your best friend’s cheating ex-boyfriend walks on.
To also buying bed sheets for the pullout couch so that she has somewhere to sleep.
To celebrating and laughing, while equally crying and helping put the pieces back together.
To tampon coaching.
To complaining about your husbands together (they all do the same irritating things).
To grieving a beautiful friendship — feeling the void as it quietly fades.
To “I would never tell your dad that, he wouldn’t understand.”
To wondering if your baby is supposed to look like that, and asking your friend who is also a new mom.
To dabbing the period stain.
To comparing menopause symptoms (they can’t last forever, can they?).
And to crying together on the bathroom floor.
It’s something only a woman can truly understand. How lucky are we?
Sources
Broad, Jacqueline. “Mary Astell on Virtuous Friendship.” Parergon, vol. 26, no. 2, 2009, pp. 65–86.
“Darling Buds: How Best Friends Keep Us Healthy and Happy.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 Jan. 2022.
“Exploring the Differences between Male and Female Friendships.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers.
Friedman, Ann. “‘The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship.’” The New York Times, 18 Sept. 2015.
Goldman, Bruce. “How Men’s and Women’s Brains Are Different.” Stanford Medicine Magazine, 21 Sept. 2022.
Mogg, Katie, and Catherine Pearson. “Why Friendship Breakups Hurt So Much.” The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2024.
Taylor, Shelley E. “Tend and Befriend Theory.” Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology: Volume 1, 2012, pp. 32–49, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249215.n3.
“The Healing Power of Female Friendships – Insights From the IE Student Well-Being Survey.” Center For Health & Well-Being.
Travers, Mark. “A Unique Reason Why Female Friendships Are Stronger -By a Psychologist.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 20 Aug. 2024.
