My best friend and I have a very efficient system for making decisions. I tell her what I am thinking of doing; she tells me what I should do instead; I ignore her advice; then I call her when everything goes wrong. She listens to the entire story, including the parts she predicted with frightening accuracy, before reminding me that she told me so. We have been doing this for years. At this point, I’m not sure whether I have developed a personality or simply outsourced parts of it to another person.
I cannot buy a top without sending her a picture, experience a mildly inconvenient interaction without narrating it to her or make a major life decision without wondering what she would say. She knows the names of people I have mentioned only once, remembers arguments I have long forgotten and can identify the precise tone in which I say “it’s fine” when it is very much not fine. In turn, I have become an unpaid therapist, personal historian, crisis manager and occasionally the only person qualified to explain why she is upset about something she insists she is not upset about.
We call this friendship. If we are feeling particularly sentimental, we call it sisterhood. Nobody has suggested that either of us needs to get a life, and frankly, neither of us is in a position to make that recommendation.
What interests me is how easily this level of dependence becomes ordinary in female friendships. We have turned emotional dependence into a friendship ideal: having someone who knows everything, is always available, can read your mind and finish your sentences. We joke about sharing one brain cell. We refer to each other as our other half. We say things like “I literally cannot function without you” and mean it affectionately, even when there is a slightly concerning amount of truth to it. Imagine saying the same thing about a boyfriend. Suddenly, it sounds like a conversation waiting to happen.
Of course, there is a difference between unhealthy codependency and the casual dependence we celebrate in everyday friendship. Not every frequent phone call is a symptom, and not every shared password or unsolicited opinion is evidence of an unhealthy attachment. Sometimes, you have simply found a person whose presence makes the administrative burden of being alive considerably more manageable. There is something lovely about that.
Still, I find it interesting that behaviors we might scrutinize in romantic relationships become evidence of exceptional intimacy in female friendships. We expect a romantic partner to respect our independence but think nothing of a best friend wanting a full account of our evening. We might find it unreasonable for a boyfriend to expect a say in every decision, yet happily consult a friend before choosing a university, ending a relationship, booking a vacation or sending a text that could have been three words long.
The difference, perhaps, is that female friendship comes with very few formal expectations. There is no universally recognized point at which you are supposed to call your best friend, no agreed-upon definition of commitment and certainly no anniversary marking the day you became each other’s primary source of unsolicited advice. We get to invent the rules ourselves, and because those rules are shaped by affection, they rarely feel like rules at all.
They emerge as habits. You tell her everything because you always have. You call because she is the person you turn to. You consult her because, somewhere along the way, her opinion has become part of your own decision-making process. Eventually, it becomes difficult to distinguish between wanting her input and being unable to trust your judgment without it.
But perhaps the more interesting question is why this dependence feels so comfortable in the first place.
Women are often encouraged to construct emotional lives centered around their relationships with others. We learn to pay attention to shifts in tone, remember the small details, anticipate how our words might affect someone and talk through our feelings rather than leave them unspoken. Female friendships can become spaces where these skills are not only accepted but enthusiastically reciprocated. You can spend 40 minutes explaining why a seemingly insignificant comment upset you, and instead of asking why you are making such a big deal out of nothing, your friend will ask what directly preceded it.
There is a particular relief in not having to justify the amount of feeling you bring into a room. You can be dramatic, repetitive, irrational or embarrassingly sentimental, and someone will understand that these are not necessarily permanent character traits. Sometimes you are simply having a Tuesday.
In a world where women are frequently expected to make themselves agreeable, emotionally available and easy to understand, there is something quietly liberating about a friendship in which you do not have to edit yourself.
The danger, if there is one, is that being understood can become more appealing than being challenged. A friend who knows all your insecurities can reassure you, but she can also reinforce them. Two people can spend hours analyzing the same problem without ever considering that perhaps the problem needs to be left alone. Together, you can become remarkably good at making each other’s worst habits feel like personality quirks.
But I do not think this makes intensely close friendships inherently bad. In fact, I question the idea that the healthiest relationships are necessarily those in which nobody needs anybody too much. We tend to treat independence as the ultimate proof of emotional maturity, as though relying on another person somehow compromises our sense of self. Yet sometimes, you become more yourself because someone else knows you so well.
The question is not whether we depend on our friends, but what that dependence allows us to do. Does having someone to call make it easier to navigate the world, or does it make the world feel impossible without them? Can you disagree without worrying that the friendship is in danger? Can you make a decision she would not make, have an experience she cannot relate to or go a few days without speaking without treating it as evidence that something has changed?
There is a difference between someone being woven into your life and someone becoming the entire fabric of it.
Maybe we have normalized emotional dependence in female friendships because, in its more ordinary forms, it does not always look like dysfunction. It looks like care. It looks like being remembered, being checked on, being taken seriously. I do not want less of that. I do not want friendships so carefully bounded that every favor becomes a negotiation and every emotional need must first be assessed for reasonableness. I want the ridiculous closeness, the unearned confidence in each other’s abilities and the assumption that we will always show up. I want to be able to say, without irony, that someone is a part of me.
It is worth remembering that closeness is not measured by how little you can do without someone. It is measured, perhaps, by how much of yourself you are able to bring into a relationship without having to surrender the rest. And if my best friend and I occasionally behave like two people who have accidentally entered a lifelong joint custody arrangement over our own lives, I can live with that, as long as we both remember that the point is not to become one person.
It is to be two people who, for reasons neither of us can fully explain, have decided that being alive is considerably funnier, easier and more bearable together.