Is this the biggest taboo in friendship?
Why owning up to our bad behaviour is still the scariest step of all
As someone who spends a lot of her time banging on about how pop culture relentlessly shoves glossy, perfect representations of female friendship down our throats, I’m all over the Miss Me? podcast with Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver like a rat up a drainpipe.
I’m sure it helps that they’re both my age - ie. very, very young - and were raised in Ladbroke Grove, West London, where I lived in my twenties. But what I’m really into is their unfiltered portrayal of friendship, especially as I hadn't actually realised the singer and TV presenter had grown up together before BBC Sounds had a word.
Their friendship is as refreshing as a frozen marg on a hot summer’s day - and by that I mean it’s a cocktail of unflattering stories and unkind behaviour, of the sort most of us have probably experienced with an old friend. It’s just while most of us try to forget about it and pretend it never happened (if we’re still friends at all), these two aren’t afraid to air their misdemeanours, hold them up to the light and have a laugh about them - however painful that might be.
But, because we’re not used to hearing that sort of brutal female friendship honesty, it’s jarring for many of us. We can’t understand how being thoughtless or even cruel to one another - the sorts of things we’re taught to think should spell the end of a friendship - can actually be the building blocks of one.
Take this week’s episode. Miquita told a pretty brutal story about Lily sleeping with her celebrity crush on purpose in the early Noughties.
“There was a pop star. I found out that he fancied me. I told Lily that I liked him,” Miquita recalled. “And she was like, ‘well, I like him’. And I was like, well that doesn’t matter because he likes me. Cue Lily gets herself to a festival in Japan and seduces him with her wily ways. And then calls me the next day to say, ‘I need to tell you that I slept with him’.”
I mean, ouch. I’m not saying that’s great behaviour. But - guess what? - neither were they. Miquita accused Lily of ‘sabotaging’ her and said “I have never been so angry with you in my entire life” as they laughed their heads off. There was clearly a bit of discomfort there, but they got through it anyway.
When I clicked on the comments under the BBC clip of this on Instagram - which have sadly now been deleted - most of them were calling Lily a ‘bad friend’ and saying that Miquita should never have forgiven her.
That told me one thing: owning up to the unpleasant stuff we’ve done really is one of the last taboos in female friendship. Rather than seeing such honesty as refreshing, vulnerable and an opportunity to grow, we view it as a chance to judge and a sign that all isn’t well.
Except… I’ll bet plenty of those people who wrote things like ‘sorry but this isn’t friendship behaviour’ and ‘has Lily not heard of the Girl Code?’ will have acted badly towards a friend themselves and not had the guts to be accountable for it. Or will have been at the receiving end of a friend’s poor actions and not told them how angry it made them feel. Keeping this stuff in and not telling our friends how their behaviour impact us, is exactly the sort of thing that leads to even our closest connections being weakened. Speaking up, letting them know, giving them a chance to respond - that’s the scary stuff that healthy female friendship is made of.
Clearly, many of Lily and Miquita’s decisions were impacted by being young, under the influence, or as a result of experiencing fame early on. Not all of us can relate to that. But what we should be able to understand is that deep, lasting friendship - even newer friendship, sometimes - is rarely straightforward. People upset one another, say stupid things and make poor calls all the bloody time. It’s just that we’ve been conditioned not to talk about it with our female friends, lest we rock the boat and upset the pretence of being oh so ‘nice’ to one another. How real is that?
What if, instead of buying into the lie that the only two types of friendship between women are perfect/girl code or mean girl/toxic, we embrace the fact it’s often just as turbulent as any other long-lasting and important relationship in our lives? Perhaps then we wouldn’t be so offended by a realistic portrayal of a deep female bond that has overcome bad times and emerged stronger for it - in a place where two grown-up women don’t care, actually, who got off with whom 20 years ago, because their friendship is far more important.
That doesn’t have to mean that their model of friendship is for you or ‘right’. But it does offer an alternative to the myth of the perfect BFF that keeps so many of us feeling as though our friendships aren’t ‘good enough’ - or that we aren’t good enough, if it isn’t all love hearts and Galentine’s Day cards.
As Miquita put it in a previous episode: “I think it’s quite a big part of our relationship that we weren’t always great for each other. That’s not what this has always been about, like all true relationships that go the distance.”
Forget shaggable pop stars, that’s a love story I can get on board with. Can’t you?
Very interesting, I have experienced some relationship difficulties with very old friends as we've both changed with life experiences and time. In each case we've both changed a lot from when we first met and there is sometimes an aspect of becoming fundamentally incompatible. Sometimes friends just grow apart.