19-05-2025
Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith: Beware the 'girl crush'
Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith (Faber £18.99, 336pp)
Does she love me as much as I love her? It's always me who initiates the texts suggesting we meet up. Right. I'm going to stop messaging her, and see how long it takes for her to notice.' If this kind of friendship inferiority complex has ever filled you with anxiety (it's certainly happened to me), cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith's book Bad Friend is a must-read.
Her investigation into female friendships and how they really work opens with two of her own friendship disasters. She felt desolate and abandoned when her once-close friend Sofia went cold on her.
That friendship was, Watt Smith writes, 'my great romance, my proudest achievement' (she means platonic romance; she's happily married). 'I began to feel I was a failure at the essential aspect of feminine and feminist life.'
The same happened with another woman, Liza, with whom Watt Smith shared a flat in her early 20s. At first, Watt Smith was infatuated by this slightly older woman who collected shells and crystals, and had a tattoo and a hot-pink streak in her hair. But the friendship 'burned very bright and then exploded' after just one year.
The mistake she'd made, and which so many of us make, is that she almost fetishised Liza; she sort-of wanted to be her. Yes, many of us have had that 'This is the woman I want to be' feeling on meeting someone amazing.
But that's the wrong way to go about it. Watt Smith has learned to celebrate differences, rather than to try to be exactly like someone else; and she's learned that friendships unfold in ways we do not expect or plan for. 'Less cultivated garden, more wild meadow.'
This book is also a celebration of female friendships through the ages, mainly in the previous century.
In the 20th century, trends changed dramatically, from the banning of girl-crushes at Cheltenham Ladies' College in 1913 (they were 'a mental instability', the headmistress declared) to today's T-shirts for girls with hearts on them and 'Best Friends Forever' emblazoned across the front. (Watt Smith fears that those T-shirts sell heightened expectations to young girls.)
And whereas a 1936 book called Manners advised against making intimate friends of one's co-workers, 'as office friendships often do curdle', nowadays women are positively encouraged to embrace a 'work-wife' or a 'work-buddy'.
In a recent Gallup poll, employees who described having 'a best friend' at work were less likely to experience burnout or to be considering leaving.
By writing this book, Watt Smith has learned that 'the real commitment we make to our friends does not come in the triumph of the times we got it right, but in those small acts that show our willingness to keep trying'.
