The power and importance of female friendship

It’s easy to lose your female friendships when you get married. You’re in love, he’s your best friend, and suddenly, that time that you used to put into your female friends is now taken up with your husband. And then, when you find yourself divorced and needing them, it’s much harder to get those friends back. 

Not to mention those couple-friends you’ve collected. Who gets which friend? What side will they be on? As you split up your possessions and your bank accounts, you might also be doing that with your friend group. 

When you go through a divorce, you find yourself in a group of women, a sorority if you will, that allows for shared experiences and easy empathy. Time to make some new friends and start building your community. It becomes even more important, when you’re single, fresh out of a divorce, to invest in friendships. These safe spaces and safe people will provide the room for you to deal with your grief and get back to yourself.

While it’s important to spend time alone, it’s just as important to spend time with friends. Friends can remind us who we are, what we like to do, and how we behave outside of a romantic relationship.

During my marriage, I didn’t have many female friends. I didn’t think that I was a girl’s girl. After working as a line cook in a restaurant with mostly male chefs, I prided myself on being able to hang with the guys. We all know these women. Cue Amy’s cool girl monologue from Gone Girl. The skills learned in the kitchen helped me both in the standup comedy and startup tech worlds, similar male-dominated scenes where there weren’t many other women.

But I needed girlfriends and had there been more in my life, perhaps I would have questioned the behavior of my ex-husband much earlier. There’s something about having other women with whom you can open up, ask for help, and receive sanity checks if something feels off in your relationship.

So after my divorce, the first thing I did was throw myself into as many female friendships as I could. Whether it was calling up friends I hadn’t seen in ages or being brave about making new friends, I knew how important these women would be in my recovery and healing because I was feeling their absence viscerally.

Old friends remind you who you were, which can be important when you’re on the journey of self-discovery post-divorce. I like being able to talk to people who knew me when I was younger because they make me realize that I’m not all that different. Not really.

And new friends are important for redefining who you want to be in this next chapter of your life. Meeting new people, identifying as a divorcee, it doesn’t have to be difficult. But you do have to put some work in. That work and effort is worth it when you look around and see the support system you have built for yourself.

How did your friendships help you along your divorce journey? If you’re looking for a way to reconnect with friends you may have lost, or thank those that stuck around, be sure to check out the DD cards that have been specially created for this very thing!