One of the things that I missed the most about high school and college are my girl-friends.
For this post, I’m making a distinction between “girlfriends” a person that a male-identified straight person has as a romantic and sexual partner, and a “girl-friend,” who is platonic female identified friend to a male-identified straight person. I’m not saying that Gay identified men do not have “girl-friends,” but taking account to my positionality, and the point of this post, we are talking about what it means for a straight guy (me) to have girl-friends high school.
Recently, I made a list of all of my close friends in high school and about a quarter of them were men.
In high school the social environment gave me more freedom to interact socially with woman then in my adult life. There were more corners of schools, conversations in hallways, and situations in music classes that provided me the time and space to hang out with my girl-friends. As an adult, I have found less and less that there is socially accepted for me to hang out with women who are friends. In block parties, I find all of the women are talking in a group, and all of the men segregate themselves into a separate group. Think about it for a second, for me as a married man, to ask another married woman out to go watch a movie is usual, and raises eye-brows.
My connection to women as friends goes all the way back to my mother. She has been an amazing mother all my life, but she has also been a close friend. She would listen to me talk about all kinds of things, and helped me discover many of the things I loved about myself. Many of my favorite activities as a child were associated with my mom like grocery shopping, and cooking in the kitchen.
I didn’t connect with other boys as a young child. Most of them were into sports, and I wasn’t. Hanging out with them in recess never worked out so well, because the talk and activities were sports-centric. In girls, I found people, like my mom, who were as interested in talking about life as much as I did.
In Montessori kindergarten, one of my best friends was a little white girl with curly hair. We would play all of the time together. She would lead me around the room, and at some point, she kissed me. This was all confusing, but what I did get is that my life made more sense with her as a friend.
Middle School was more of the same. I did eventually join up with a group of guys one year younger than me who were into comic books, (which I loved at that age) than sports. We would talk comics during recess as opposed to playing sports. While this developed, I found strong connections with girls during class, and the in the hallways.
I knew at this age that it wasn’t normal to have girl-friends. I don’t remember other kids making comments to me about this in middle school, but I do remember some teachers having a laugh about how “chummy” I was with some girls. It wasn’t until high school where this starting feeling more and more out of place.
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