From grades 6-12 I went to an all-girls school, and it was fabulous.
My class was 88 girls strong, and each girl genuinely cared for one another. The environment was supportive, the administration and teachers took a real interest in each student, and I didn’t have to brush my hair in the morning.
Look I was going for:
Look I achieved:
And most importantly, there really was no boy drama. This is not to say that girls didn’t talk about their boyfriends or crushes or Homecoming dates, but there wasn’t the aura of competitive cattiness that I felt when I attended my co-ed middle school or saw and heard about in the co-ed high schools.
Girls ran through the hallways singing and dancing, we stuffed our faces with baked goods, and we all generally existed and lived without sending our actions through a filter of impressing guys.
I wouldn’t change my high school experience for all the Celine bags in the word, but now that I am in college, I realize that from the ages of 15-18 I lacked something great—guy friends.
Now before you jump to conclusions about why I didn’t have guy friends, let me say that my weekends were not typical high school weekends. For about 30 weekends a year, I was not home. I was travelling all across the U.S. competing in horseshows where the girl to guy ratio is about 150:1. Yes in high school I knew guys and was friendly with many of them. We would hang out during the rare occasions that I was actually in town, and I would go to Prom, Homecoming, etc., but the quality of my friendly relationships with guys in high school pales in comparison to the quality of my male friendships now. I never thought I would be a “guy’s girl”, where I have mainly guy friends, but hey, here I am, and I love it. If you don’t have any guy friends, my one suggestion would be to get some. I never really believed girls in high school who said they loved how most of their friends were guys, but now I see the light.
Guy friends are everything you love in a girl friend without some of the clique-i-ness and endless conversations about crushes. Not to say that girlfriends aren’t great because they are, and I love mine to death. I’m just saying that a mix is necessary, refreshing, and adds more outlets to have meaningful conversations. They do their thing, and I do mine, and really it’s the best situation that I can imagine.