From a young age, girls are told to be jealous. People show us movies and TV shows with exactly two female characters to look up to, and, nine times out of ten, they fight the entire time. One’s usually blonde, and the other’s brunette. One’s usually “nerdy,” and the other one’s “flirty”. And, usually, all they care about is the same boring white boy.
Now, this level of indoctrination can get to all of us. God knows it’s been preached to us for literal decades, at this point. But I would like to put out there, as a general cautionary tale, that making the effort to befriend the “other woman” can make your life way easier, and you might even find yourself a new best friend.
The first time I pulled this, it took a lot of very deliberate soul-searching. I was 18 and convinced that I was 100% in love with some boy (reader, I was not actually in love; it turns out I was just 18). But this man, who we will call Michael, was only interested in my coworker, who we will call Alice.
Now, this was a truly un-fun set-up for me, working in the coffee shop Michael frequented every day, while he flirted at the register with my, admittedly very cute, co-barista. Did it hurt? Yeah. Did I wish I got that attention? Yeah. Did I hate Alice for it? …Okay, for a little bit, yeah.
And that felt vindictive and powerful for maybe a day, and then it just made me more miserable. Because, as it turned out, Alice was very funny; she had tons of cool stories about living in Amsterdam, and she also really loved ’90s rock, so theoretically, we could work together to overpower the other baristas and control the music for once.
After some self-analysis, I started making a deliberate effort to like Alice, which quickly got easier. We hung out after work. We covered for each other’s mistakes with the managers. We even shit-talked Michael sometimes, which was extremely cathartic for me. To this day, we still keep in touch, and I have an open invite to crash on her couch in Amsterdam, if I ever make it out there. And I would have missed all of that, if I’d never pulled my head out of my envious a$$ long enough to get to know her.
Furthermore, it might turn out that your type’s type is your type, thus becoming a second benefit to meeting the other woman. What I mean is that certain people attract similar people, and it could be that, if you like a guy, the girls he likes are really cool too. If it’s a classic toss-up case of your standard YA love triangle, the odds that both women are extremely compatible with each other are honestly so high, though you’d never know it from the movies.
And, as a final word, I’d like to say that, as far as investing your time into someone goes, love interests are flakey and far-between, but friends are for life. If you can push yourself past the her vs me mentality, you might end up with someone you’ll really, really love. And – isn’t that the point?