Okay Now I Will Praise A Salon Article About Women

I expected this article about women's relationships with their girlfriends to be awful--I've repeatedly bitched that Salon, for all its good liberalism, loves to pander to all sorts of ugly stereotypes of feminists and women in general. But this article is really sweet and surprisingly bold in its assertion that it's wrong to demean female friendships by implying that only "immature" women have them and "mature" women dedicate themselves to their husbands.

It also made me a little sad. I have a lot of girlfriends, but I haven't had a real best girlfriend since college. The sad truth that this article really encapsulates is that most people don't have the resources to maintain more than one dominant adult relationship at a time, and if you have a spouse or a partner that is a priority, it's difficult also to find enough time to keep a close best friend. And yes, in our culture we choose to misinterpret that fact and declare that female friendships are dry runs for "real" relationships with men, and that women shuck their friends when they marry because they are past that. When, in fact, most women who don't have time for their friends anymore feel it as a real loss.