The best part of any reality TV singing show is very often the family and friends backstage, screaming and hopping like rabbits when their candidate wins. It’s the same at any sporting event, from the Olympics to local athletics carnivals, where the faces of parents and friends show uninhibited delight in a friend or loved one’s success. Some researchers have dubbed this emotion shoy, or sharing joy.
In one of Chambliss’s studies, subjects who underwent Freudenfreude Enhancement Training were ‘more generous, less jealous, and less irritable’ than those who did not. They were happier, too. In other words, a poor response to others’ success or failure just ends up making you feel rubbish. So, share the shoy. (A mutual obligation is at work here, too. The champions in our midst also need to not get too smug, and make sure they thank those who helped.)
I AM NOT SUGGESTING female friendships are always strawberries and cream; they can be intense, painful and brutal, especially if they end abruptly. As US commentator Roxane Gay writes: ‘[You cannot] say women aren’t bitches or toxic or competitive sometimes but . . . these are not defining characteristics of female friendship, especially as you get older.’ She adds: ‘If you find that you are feeling competitive, toxic or bitchy toward the women who are supposed to be your closest friends, look at why and figure out how to fix it and/or find someone who can help you fix it.’
Yes! Because the rewards are enormous. Author Dan Buettner, who studied the ‘blue zones’ of the world where people live longest, found that one common feature was strong friendships. In Okinawa in Japan, where, on average, women live to around ninety, people are placed into almost formalised friendship groups of about five when they are newborns. These groups are called moai, and the people within them care for each other for the duration of their lives, providing whatever kind of support is needed. Relationships may disintegrate and children riot and leave the nest, but friendships endure, and too often are unsung.
We rarely hear odes to the friends alongside us throughout our lives. This is partly why depictions of complicated, strong friendships — in TV shows like Fleabag, Broad City, Younger, Parks and Recreation, Orange is the New Black, Grace & Frankie, Unbelievable, Dead to Me, Sex and the City, The Handmaid’s Tale and Girls, or in books like the elegant ‘Neapolitan Novels’ of Elena Ferrante — gain such devoted, cultish followings.
English singer and songwriter Ellie Goulding wrote the song ‘Army’ about her best friend, Hannah. She explained on Instagram:
I realised that I had focused a lot of writing on past relationships and it hit me I had never written about my best friend. The person I met in college over ten years ago. The person who was at my very first gig. The person who has seen me at my lowest and the first person I call in muffled sobs when something bad happens. We’ve been deliriously happy together, deliriously tired and deliriously sad together. I wanted to show our friendship for what it really is — honest, real, electric . . . the laughing at our own ridiculousness and foolishness, comparing our trials and errors, overthinking our breakups and new loves, remembering everything we’ve been through to get to this point and being so proud of it . . . We open our hearts up and take risks but together we are more powerful than ever. We are challenged every day but we see it through and sometimes it feels like we can conquer anything.
As she told Hannah, ‘When I’m with you, I’m standing with an army’.
It’s not about air punches or #squadgoals or Instagram boasts as perfected by Taylor Swift’s old posse of spindly Amazonians. It’s about a quiet knowledge that when one of your friends stands up on a cold, wet day in Canberra to speak about a dream she has fought for and made real, you stand taller too.
My daughter has heard me bang on for years about my belief that choosing, and sticking by, loyal, decent friends is one of the most important things in life. What I’m waiting for her to understand is that by doing so, she isn’t winnowing birthday party invitations. She’s building an army.
Chapter 14
She Trashed Her Golden Locks
When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn’t belong anywhere . . . It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed . . . that’s where I belonged, that was my country.
— from Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
THE MOST RELIABLE WAY to judge my best friend Jock’s state of mind is by her hair. The first conversation we remember having was about her colossal rope of a ponytail. It was thick, blonde, straight and long, swung like a cartoon tail, and brushed against my shoulders when we sat back to back at our desks in sixth grade.
I had just returned from New York where I had spent most of primary school, and had unfortunately embraced the ‘feathered’ Charlie’s Angels look then popular in my neighbourhood. This resulted in a limp, shaggy style that hung in my eyes; my pigtails were stumps.
One day, walking into my new school in Sydney, I saw Jock — then known by her actual name of Jacqui — had not just chopped off her glorious hair, but replaced it with a borderline mullet. I turned to her in astonishment: ‘Why did you cut off your hair?’
She stared back, almost scowling. ‘Fool,’ read her eyes. ‘What do I care for hair?’
I gazed back with quiet respect. We have been inseparable ever since.
When we were fifteen, floating around a pool on the Gold Coast, I christened her Jock. It suited her. She was blunt, funny and clever. She was always cooler and less sentimental than me. She walked away from hairstyles, relationships, everything really, without blinking. On our last day of school I was red-eyed, hugging friends, fiercely promising we would always be in touch even though — sob — we probably wouldn’t. Spent, I turned and saw Jock standing alone, staring towards the school gate. ‘Right,’ she said, sliding sunglasses onto her face, ‘Let’s. Get. The fuck. Out of here.’
I laughed. She was right; it was time. We’d never really felt like we fitted in. The suburbs we lived in were suffocating. It wasn’t our families, which were close and — mostly — endured our late nights and four-hour phone conversations, it was the heavy atmosphere of convention and complacency along leafy streets that we burned to escape. Jock says what she remembers most is disapprovaclass="underline" a dense fog of disapproval we seemed to permanently inhabit.
Disapproval of our opinions: the boyfriends who told us, ‘You think too much.’ (Disapproval of our boyfriends, too, on whom opinions wildly varied, but who could turn from the furnace blasts of first love?)
Disapproval of our ambitions: the priests who told us women were meant to stay at home and submit to men. The church leader who showed his disapproval of the fact I had skipped youth group for a few weeks during my final school exams by saying, when hearing of my results, ‘It’s good to come top of the state. But it’s bad to burn in hell.’ The message was clear: our brains, our lusts, our yearnings, our desires to stride the globe in large, firm steps — all were sinful.
Disapproval of the way we looked. When Jock shaved her head one day before a wedding, the only way to describe the looks on our friends’ parents’ faces was pure disgust. I stiffened and stared; she stiffened and looked down, reddening. The blushing rebel.
Disapproval of the ideas we explored, whether to do with feminism, racial inequality or the shocking treatment of Indigenous people in this country. When I was seventeen, some elders took me out to a local coffee shop for ice cream and a hosing down: they were concerned about me, they said, concerned about my unpolished, poorly articulated but genuine desire to help improve the lives of the vulnerable. One woman placed her hands on top of mine, looked in my eyes and said, ‘You know, ultimately social justice is a waste of time. Everything on this earth is.’ I so clearly remember my anger as I walked slowly to my car, a beaten-up white VW Beetle, slid in, placed my hands on the steering wheel and accelerated away.