This is why I revoke access to folks who mishandle my kindness. Kindness is the bare minimum. You are a very sick & twisted person if you assume kindness means you’ve conquered someone or established some type of power play — ironically, this is how you announce your inferiority.
Ppl do be asking why you not in a relationship like it’s a drivers license or something ..man you know how many things have to align for a relationship to happen lol
Female friendships can become an incredibly complex dance of manipulation, gaslighting, people-pleasing, love, care, selfishness, selflessness, jealousy, envy, and competition.
There is often immense tenderness there, but also an entire subterranean social game operating beneath the surface.
If you are good at managing these dynamics, regulating your reactions, reading subtext, and still participating in the game while remaining human, you will probably have a decent number of close female friendships. But even a little social awkwardness, emotional transparency, or inability to tolerate masked behaviour can make female friendships extremely difficult to navigate.
Your friends can slowly become your bullies, and it takes an enormous amount of emotional labour to keep moving through those dynamics when you do not naturally possess the social machinery required for them. You begin noticing the injustice, indirectness, performative sweetness, hidden hostility, constant testing, and you cannot keep pretending it is normal.
That is why some women do not have many female friends. It is not always because they are jealous, male-centred, or a “red flag.” Sometimes they simply cannot metabolise the amount of social theatre, disguised aggression, and psychological negotiation required to survive certain female circles.
The amount of mindspace you have to pay to remain inside such relationships can be enormous.
I salute women who have their own identity, their own style, their own opinions, and their own way of seeing the world. It's a lot of copy & paste energy out here