Advice Guru Liz Pryor Tackles Female Friendships
Advice guru Liz Pryor stresses the importance of making and keeping friends.
April 20, 2011 — -- Many women seem to feel an unspoken pressure to match the media's portrayal of female friendship. The truth is, all of us would like the strong sense of bonding and belonging, dining, laughing and shopping we see in the movies and on television between friends.
Why wouldn't we? Think of "Sex and the City" -- the perfect modern-day societal example of female friends. Do most women actually have four enmeshed girlfriends they can count on in a pinch, meet with weekly, speak with daily, and hop on a plane with on a whim for a trip to Mexico? Therein may lay one of our problems.
What has become of the modern-day woman? She is somewhere in the area of working one or two jobs, married, divorced or single, raising kids, retired and raising grandkids, cleaning, cooking, shopping, struggling, stressing, exhausted, feeding, bathing, exercising and nurturing. Frankly, the average American woman does most of these things on a daily basis. She has morphed into a multi-tasking, wildly accomplished human being who fits more into a day than ever before. Where in this life is the time to nurture and enjoy our Lucy, Ethel, Samantha, Carrie, whoever?
I've received numerous emails from women suggesting that their friendship life is in trouble. Most claim they don't have many friends anymore. Others claim they don't know how to make friends, and even more claim they aren't able to find the time. Many of us seem to put our friendship on the back burner as we try and navigate all our other responsibilities. Right or wrong, this is what we do.
Some of us seem to have made room and time for friends a little better than others. It might be time to take a beat, a step back, to try and remember what happens to your soul, to your laugh and to the meaning of your everyday life when you have a female counterpart with whom to share it all. This is truly the single greatest medicine for the female soul. We simply can not sell its value short. ... But we do.
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