Women, here's why you'll always have ‘bad friends'

Telegraph

12-04-2025

My first friendship, when I was 12, was so formative that the minutiae of its creation and implosion are more vivid to me than that, two decades later, of an 11-year romantic relationship. I still have, somewhere in a box, a black ring-binder chronicling my and my friend's daily interactions, from furtive classroom notes to postcards and 'tops secret' six-page letters. I can still perfectly visualise her turquoise ink and curly handwriting. There were also endless lists: why she was my best friend, why I was her best friend, and eventually, after five years, why she was a bad friend.
'The fear of the bad friend is perennial,' writes historian Tiffany Watt Smith in Bad Friend, which adeptly traces the evolution of female friendship across the past century. Interspersed with personal ruminations on the times she resented such a figure – or became one herself – she asks why and how friendship, as we understand it today, became intrinsic to our notions of what women are and how they behave. For by the 20th century, she writes, 'being likeable and popular, and having close friends', had become 'an identifying marker of an ideal and conventional femininity'. It's why, during the deluge of 1990s rom-coms, the 'popular' girl, so often flanked by two female sidekicks, is usually the subject of universal lust. And those films were never really about the boy: from Princess Diaries to Mean Girls, female friendship drives the plot.
Often, when I've spoken to other young women about first love and heartbreak, they talk not of romantic partners but, like me, about an early female friendship. This was their induction into the exquisitely painful sequence of love, admiration and obsession followed by paranoia, jealousy and betrayal. Yet for centuries, Watt Smith writes, friendship was only esteemed when it was between men. 'Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good and alike in virtue,' wrote Aristotle. Montaigne deemed women 'incapable of this 'holy bond'', their souls not 'firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn.'
By the 17th century, however, upper-class women were being taught to read and write, and they were soon sending each other devoted letters. Watt Smith offers some breathless correspondence from Mary Wollstonecraft to the illustrator Fanny Blood, in which the former describes the latter as the one 'whom I love better than all the world… to live with this friend is the height of my ambition'. After Blood's death, Wollstonecraft wore for the rest of her life a bejewelled mourning ring containing her friend's hair.
With the rise of boarding schools for girls, female friendship became grounded in a new kind of physical intimacy, and developed an erotic undercurrent. Dinah Craik wrote in her 1858 guidebook A Woman's Thoughts About Women that these bonds were as 'delicious and almost as passionate as first love'. Boarding-school novels about the relationships of girlhood were serialised in the weekly papers. By 1913, magazines were warning mothers of the 'dangers' of girl crushes. 'The girl with the crush,' writes Watt Smith, 'became the century's first Bad Friend.'
These crushes were inevitably reviled as proof of the feminine capacity for hysteria and weakness. Take, for instance, Mary-Lou, the 'poor, timid' girl from Enid Blyton 's Malory Towers books: she worships an older classmate by performing constant acts of service, and even her friends mock her as a 'little ninny'. Was this a reflection of societal homophobia, wonders Watt Smith, or something more complicated? She gestures to Blyton's own whirlwind friendship with a nurse called Dorothy, employed by the writer to help with childcare following the breakdown of Blyton's marriage to Hugh Pollock. Pollock's second wife Ida alleged that something 'unsavoury' had been at play, claiming that Pollock had found the two women 'locked in a bathroom together' on several occasions. (The friendship ended when Blyton remarried. Dorothy would not attend the ceremony, Watt Smith explains, 'disapproving of its haste'.)
Female friendship became increasingly political. 'With each new freedom won by women,' Watt Smith explains, 'fears about their friendships gather momentum.' A case in point: the women's liberation movement, which itself led to a friction between women that produces some of Bad Friend's most engaging analysis. The movement may have created a powerful female solidarity, yet its results promoted an individualism that splintered female communities, heightening comparisons and rivalries.
For the ultimate 'bad friend', or so Watt Smith hypothesises, is the woman who eschews sisterhood to pursue her individual ambition. Take Dorothy Arzner, the only woman directing feature-length studio films in Hollywood during the 1930s. It would fit so neatly for her to have risen through the ranks at Paramount thanks to, as Watt Smith puts it, 'female workers sticking together to stick it to the patriarchy'. Yet Arzner dismissed this narrative. 'No one gave me trouble because I was a woman,' she said later. 'Men were more helpful than women.'
Today, Arzner might end up described as a 'pick me girl': internet slang for a woman who seeks validation from men by undermining other women, not least in describing herself, implicitly or explicitly, as 'not like other girls'. In fact, now that therapy-speak dominates online spaces, we no longer refer to 'bad' friends so much as 'toxic' friends – people who're corrosive to our mental health and must be swiftly cut from our lives.
This focus on the self and how others make us feel, combined with the rise in online comparison culture and the atomising effects of 'alternate' lifestyles – being single and/or childless, as women increasingly are – has made female friendship more fraught than ever. In the media and online, for instance, it seems like barely a week goes by without another viral first-person account from a 'wronged' friend. 'Why Can't Our Friendship Survive Your Baby', published by New York Magazine in 2023 was a standout. I read more agony-aunt columns about toxic friends than about toxic relationships.
Even Watt Smith's book seems, at its core, bent less on tracing 20th-century women's history than on trying, sometimes to the point of solipsism, to absolve her own perceived failings as a friend. The book would have been stronger without such personal interludes, which are too vague and repetitive to be compelling. These could have been replaced with longer discussions of witch-trials, friendships across class boundaries, and what social media has meant for it all.
In the meantime, it seems to this young woman as though our standards for friendship are getting higher and higher, even as we grapple with a loneliness epidemic: 16- to 29-year-olds are twice as likely to be chronically lonely than those who are over 70. Perhaps, as Watt Smith concludes, we should stop proclaiming others to be 'amazing' friends or 'terrible' friends, and content ourselves to be, and to have, friends who are simply good enough.