Love and Friendship

This story below comes from a wonderful blogger Blonde Duck. She is an aspiring writer with a collection of short stories that are full of wit and humor (and often times pie!) Married to her love Ben and raising two furry children she dishes up a little reality about her and friends, guys and girls. You can find her page at A Duck In Her Pond.



When your best friend is your husband, it’s hell finding girlfriends.

Growing up, I was always a guy’s girl. Even though I was convinced I was a princess and wore only pink dresses, you’d be more likely to find me digging a hole with China in the sandbox with the boys rather than giggling on the sidelines with the girls. From first grade until freshman year of college, most of my friends were boys. I was like the Gwen Stefani of Anderson High School—blond, girlie but totally in the boy’s club. Forget ladies’ lunches and shopping trips. I was the sole girl with several guys in heels at rock concerts, pool halls and disgusting dorm rooms with foil on the windows.

And then I met my husband. And my guy friends became a problem.

As much as I hate to admit it, a lot of guys make friends with women knowing that they would date them in a heart beat. There are the guys that wouldn’t even think of it, but they are few and far between. While many criticized my decision. I distanced myself from a lot of my college guy friends unless we were out as a big group. If my husband wasn’t going to go hang out with other women alone, it didn’t seem fair for me to.

There was only one problem. I had no girlfriends.

Growing up, I’d always had one girl best friend. At 13, hormones and a move to California caused our friendship to drift apart amicably. In high school, I had a girlfriend so close I had a tooth brush at her house until we both went to college.


But now, as an adult woman in a small college, I had a problem. The girls I met didn’t want to go hang out with guys in big groups. They wanted to go get drinks at swanky bars, eat salads at charming little restaurants and get pedicures. With pearls wrapped around their neck and stylish outfits, they looked like a model that fell out of a magazine.

No pearls here!

I didn’t. I was in the horseback riding club. I wear cowboy boots in the winter and my hair in wet ponytails. My ideal meal was a hamburger and unless a bar had dancing, I was going to be bored out of my mind.


I hate pedicures.

But I didn’t fit in with the tomboy crowd either. They wanted to go on biking excursions that lasted three days and had more armpit hair than a gorilla. They saw my pink dresses and love for baking cookies as feminist entrapment and wanted to free me from my domestic prison.

So I came to the most logical conclusion: I needed to find girlfriends in a relationship. They would understand my reluctance to go to frat parties, my dislike of going out at 10 at night and love of sundresses, right?

Wrong. The women I met in relationships only wanted to do one thing: Bitch. They whined about their boyfriends, obsessed over getting engaged and told me things about their romantic life that would have shocked Dr. Sue. They bullied me for not wanting to go out all the time without my husband and pushed me to get a ring. I fled in terror.

I can haz girlfriends?!?!?

Ever since, I’ve met several great women. Some are moms, some are single, some are in a relationship. They all understand me and my quirks. The more women I’ve met; the more I’ve realized that good girlfriends are out there.

But my experiences taught me a sad truth that was proved to me the other week. A dear friend of mine had a birthday I couldn’t attend because Ben was sick. I wasn’t willing to leave him, and she was hurt and disappointed.

I will never have the friendships seen in movies like Sex and the City. I won’t have a group of girlfriends that put each other above all else, all husbands and children. And it’s due to one simple fact: My husband comes first. My family comes second. Our health is third. And everything else comes after that.

Considering I’ve got the love of my life and best friend, I think it’s a pretty good tradeoff.


What do you think? Have you had trouble making girlfriends or trouble with relationships because of friends? Let’s dish, ya’ll!