I love love. I really do. I’ll watch any rom-com you put in front of me, read any romance story you give me and talk for hours about your new crush. I’m a total hopeless romantic.
But I think it’s easy for us to get far too caught up in the romantic notion of love, often forgetting the importance of the platonic relationships in our lives. I think it’s particularly easy for us girls to forget them. We’re bombarded by media and literature and people all telling us the love in our lives should be romantic. And in that, we’re pitted against one another in competition for that love. A game of who’s dating who and who isn’t and who’s a lover scorned. It’s exhausting.
So exhausting, it becomes necessary to seek refuge in our friendships. To find solace in returning to those friends who see you as a person with real thoughts and feelings, not just as a first date that you may or may not take home at the end of the night. Our female friends are incredibly important to our well-being, and they deserve recognition for that.
Part of the problem is that we don’t see enough female friendships celebrated in popular culture. In such a “plugged-in” time where we all have some kind of parasocial relationship with one celebrity or another, we’re going to reproduce what we see. So, from now on, I’m choosing to have a favorite celebrity couple anymore. I think that’s boring—been there, done that. I’m going to have a favorite celebrity friendship between two women that I can admire.
And I’m choosing Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.
Both actresses and activists, Fonda and Tomlin have been friends since 1980 when they both starred in the beloved movie 9 to 5, alongside country singer Dolly Parton. Over the years, they’ve both accumulated numerous accolades and awards, been arrested a handful of times and spoken proudly about how much their friendship means to them.
I was first introduced to their friendship in 2015. Fonda and Tomlin had just released their new show, the Netflix comedy series Grace and Frankie. It was a show about an unlikely female friendship between two octogenarians that became the most important bond in their lives. For a young girl on the cusp of her teenage years, seeing such a healthy friendship, both on and off the screen, impacted me profoundly.
That same year, at a TEDWomen conference celebrating female friendships, Fonda said, “I don’t even know what I would do without my women friends. I have my friends therefore I am. I exist because I have my women friends.”
She’s right. When I think about it, the person I am today is built from all of the female friendships I’ve had since I was a little girl. Whether they ended in a crash and burn from getting too close to the sun or are still flying high, each has taught me something about what it means to be there for another person.
Fonda went on to quote Gloria Steinem, saying, “‘Men fear that becoming ‘we’ will erase his ‘I’.” You know, his sense of self. Whereas women’s sense of self has always been kind of porous. But our “we” is our saving grace, it’s what makes us strong. It’s not that we’re better than men, we just don’t have our masculinity to prove.”
You can see what Fonda and Steinem mean in real time while watching the interview. Tomlin is focused on what Fonda is saying. She’s listening intently and her entire body is turned on the couch to face her. It might seem like nothing, but this kind of attention is something I’ve only ever gotten in my female friendships. My female friends want to hear what I have to say. They care. When I talk to men, it doesn’t feel or look how it does with women. They may be listening, but they’re not really hearing me. As Fonda says, “Women’s relationships are face to face, whereas men’s are side by side.”
One of the best things about Fonda and Tomlin’s friendship is how easy it is for them to laugh with one another. In any interview they do together, it’s impossible not to laugh with them. In one for CBS, when asked why she was laughing at something Fonda said, Tomlin simply said, “I just like hearing her talk!”
Fonda and Tomlin are still laughing together. Just this month, their new movie, 80 for Brady, was released. They play two football fans who go on the ultimate trip to see Tom Brady in the Super Bowl with their friends, played by Rita Moreno and Sally Field (it’s the cast list of my dreams, minus Brady). Fonda and Tomlin believe that, as they get older, the most important thing you can do is be intentional with your friendships. You have to make the effort—in forming new friendships and nurturing the ones you already have.
Let’s be intentional this Galentine’s Day. Celebrate the female friendships in your life. Honor the Grace to your Frankie and cherish the Jane to your Lily.