The Female Sex...and the City

I have started watching ‘Sex and the City’ recently…I know, I’m about ten years later than everyone else. The thing is, I have been ill recently and at the moment I can’t leave home alone as I am so dizzy that I fall over. Due to my inability to go out alone, I have been pursuing my favourite pastime – watching TV – and I seem to have gotten hooked on the dazzling lifestyle and tales of the glamorous women in ‘Sex and the City’. The thing that stopped me from watching it before was that every time I switched it on, Kim Catrall was invariably in some state of undress and I got bored and annoyed with that pretty quickly so I didn’t feel like watching it. However, as Comedy Central has started showing it during the day, the need to remove large amounts of the sex has been necessary and this actually has encouraged me to watch it.

I’ve been watching two half hour episodes about three times a week, lapping up the luxurious yet troubled loves of the four female leads. I have cried over the Carrie and Big situation, laughed at Samantha’s sexual exploits (the ones they can show at that time of day), aahhhed at Charlotte’s sweetness and felt sorry for Miranda and her success driving men away. In watching this I have seen their many dalliances with the opposite sex but the thing that is largely forgotten is – how do you go about finding a close female friend?

I’ve known lots of women in my life and been friends with many of them but I’ve never reached that level of friendship with a woman where we trust each other implicitly and can share everything. For years I blamed this on not being a girly girl, but I am deep down.

I’m a woman, I like the same things as many women but I’ve never been able to successfully hold down a deep and meaningful friendship with a woman. So, whereas the ladies in ‘Sex and the City’ are seeking perfect relationships with men, I desperately crave a successful friendship with a woman. I have a successful relationship with a man – my husband – we love each other, we don’t play pointless games with each other, we say what we mean, we communicate well and trust each other completely. I can honestly say that I have found a great man. Yet still, my search to find a woman who likes me and with whom I can have a close friendship eludes me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m friends with lots of women and there are many women that I care about a great deal but I can never seem to build up the level of closeness that other people have with their friends. When I see my female friends in photos in a bar or somewhere on holiday, looking so happy and having a great time – I wonder why I can’t do the same.

Whenever I go out with a group of women we dance and have fun but I invariably feel that I am less liked or not as fun as the other women and this makes me feel inferior and useless and I end up feeling depressed. I find it so hard to make women like me and to get on well with women.

I never seem to have had the same problem with men. I’ve managed to forge good and close friendships with men throughout my life and my closest friends are men – this has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Over the years friendships with men have often culminated in relationships and thankfully I have stayed friends with the majority of my exes but it is sometimes difficult to be friends with men without things getting complicated. A friend of mine once told me that it is difficult for a man and woman to be friends, particularly when the woman has feelings for the man. His reasoning was that if a man and woman are friends and the man has feelings for the woman but the woman does not reciprocate, the man is likely to just stay friends without trying anything once he knows. Apparently if a man and woman are friends and the woman has feelings for the man, even if the man doesn’t reciprocate the feelings he is still likely to go for it while the opportunity is there. I’m not sure if this is always the case but it does seem to have occurred in my life at least once.

I have a few male friends with whom I have shared friendship without any sexual overtones and these are the friendships that have lasted and been some of the most trusting. I find it difficult to trust people in general and there are few people I trust wholly.

As with the girls in ‘Sex and the City’ sometimes you want to have a frank conversation with someone about how something made you feel – a sexual experience, a passionate moment and obviously it is great to have a woman to share those thoughts with. When you don’t have a close female friend this is a bit of pain as if you talk about these things to your male friends they often don’t want to hear details like that, or if they do you worry they might get the wrong idea. It is also not always enormously appropriate to talk about past experiences with your current partner so where do you turn?

When I was a kid, so disliked by girls was I that a group of them followed me home once spitting all over the back of my coat as I walked. My mam was disgusted by the sight of my spit covered coat on my return home and desperately tried to find out who did it. Whenever I became friends with women I seemed to get picked on and as I was a very sensitive child this upset me greatly. In my adult life, so disliked was I by the girls in a hair salon that I worked, one of the girls locked me on the roof and shut the fire escape door so I couldn’t get back in. Men don’t seem to have ever picked on me the way women have. I'm not tarring all women with the same brush, perhaps I've just been too scared to get to know women better due to worrying they might hurt me.

Back in my youth I had a boyfriend, who will remain nameless to spare their privacy, whom I cared about a great deal. After going out for a period of time he told me it was over – I was devastated, overly dramatic about it in hindsight but devastated nonetheless. Anyway, I had a close friend whom I called to discuss it with and she was very comforting. A few days later I phoned her again and she said she had seen my ex. I laughed and said ‘He didn’t ask you out did he?’ the line went silent. The silence was deafening and ominous and in a squeaky voice I said ‘Did he?’. She sighed and admitted that he had asked her out and that she had said yes. I remember slamming the phone down at some point and I remember how I felt. To be fair, she used to go out with him before me and they had always been close but it felt at the time like a major betrayal. Now this happened twenty years ago and when it really comes down to it, it was all part of life’s rich tapestry and if I hadn’t gone through that and everything else subsequent to this then my life may have been very different and so I am glad I went through it but at the time it really hurt.

The problem is that I have never been able to get the worry out of my head that if I am good friends with a woman that my partner may fall for them or vice versa and perhaps I have been pushing women away as friends because of this fear. As you all know, I have a ridiculously high level of perceived fear daily and perhaps I have shunned the idea of having a women as a friend due to a fear blown out of all proportion.

This is likely as when I was a kid, the people I shared most of my time and friendship with was my lovely cousins – Sam, Kim and Kendra – and my lovely sister – Shell - and we all got on great, all girls together. We didn't have boyfriends then so the worries were not an issue for me. Even then though I never really felt I was good enough due to my own self esteem issues and I so desperately wanted everyone to like me. Desperation is never a good thing and has led me to sabotaging more than one friendship with my desire to be liked. It can come across as a tad clingy.

At primary school I had a wonderful female friend with whom I spent a lot of time, I felt she really understood me and I adored her. To this day I still feel very fondly towards her and probably always will. The problem was that when we got to secondary school we were sometimes in different classes and didn’t get to see each other as much. She made friends easily while I struggled and I became so jealous of her other friends that I must have seemed positively possessive which does not come across well and is more likely to force the person away from you more than anything else. I’d never felt anything like that before, especially at the tender age of 12 and it affected me greatly. I was confused and miserable that I couldn’t make friends as easily and felt like I didn’t truly belong anywhere. I think most teenagers feel like this at some point but I just felt bereft. I made friends eventually but it was hard. Then my parents divorced and I lived with my Dad.

I found it easier to be friends with men, to a certain extent men didn’t care what I looked like or what I said and it was fun to be as lewd as possible without other women calling me a ‘slapper’.

As I got older I started wondering if my awkwardness of being friends with women was due to me maybe being attracted to women. I liked the look of women’s bottoms as they walked down the street and a few lesbians had made overtures towards me and I wondered if this was my big realization. Was I finding it difficult to talk to women as I was attracted to them? I’ve thought about it many times over the years and there are a lot of really beautiful women out there but being with a woman just isn’t something that I’m attracted to. To be honest I’ve always wanted to kiss another woman, mainly just to see what it feels like, but I am more attracted to men than women and regardless of a small amount of curiosity it appears that I am completely heterosexual. On one occasion I was in a bar on the dancefloor and a pretty looking woman danced next to me, closer and closer and she was smiling at me in a way that invited me closer. Over her shoulder I could see my friends Jamie and Caitriona urging me on, knowing as they did my now legendary desire to kiss a woman to see what it felt like but I completely bottled out and within minutes the woman was lip locked with another woman! There goes my first and last opportunity to kiss a woman.

The problem definitely lies with me as, whenever I am with a woman anywhere – be it a bar, at work, a café etc – I just feel that they are better than me, more of a woman, smarter, prettier, more intelligent and I just end up feeling bad about myself no matter what they say to make me feel better.

Or it could be, as a friend said to me recently, maybe I just haven’t met the right woman yet? Or maybe I am just self sabotaging my female friendships out of fear?

Regardless of the reason, I hope my female friends will understand when I say that I want close friendships with women, but is anyone willing to put up with me to get there?