I spent my middle school and high school years watching shows like Gossip Girls, 90210, Pretty Little Liars, and Glee. Mainly because I had an older sister who was watching them, and I just wanted to do everything she was doing. But as I got older I found comfort in these shows, as unrealistic as they were from high schoolers singing whatever was on the Billboard Top 100 that week to a young 20-something girl marrying into the royal family of Monaco. The notion of “comfort shows” is not new, everybody has one or five. It's the show that you are constantly restarting, that you put on for background noise, that you fall asleep to. Will all have our different reasons. For me, it was the large friend groups. No matter how toxic or turbulent they were, there was something about the large, and by large I mean five or more, social networks these fictional teenagers had that made all of my social worries vanish.
I should preface this by saying I did not have a lonely childhood, but I’ve never had a real solid friend group. I had the people I sat with at lunch every day throughout middle school. I had the group of girls I went to camp with every summer for two weeks for six years. I had the three people I was good friends with in high school. Even my core three friends from elementary school that I am still friends with today and were throughout high school, even though none of us went to the same school, have drifted apart. To make a long story short, I have always felt like the people I thought of as my best friends always had better friends.
As a response, I, like most kids of the 21st Century, found myself invested in fictional worlds that seemed so much better than mine. It showed me how great it could be to have a bunch of friends to go out with, party with, eat lunch with, etc... Even now I find myself invested in pop culture friend groups. The most classic example is “The Big Six.” The six supermodels that dominated the 90s, while also being friends: Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Kate Moss, and Christy Turlington. A more modern example of this would be Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Kaia Gerber, and Bella and Gigi Hadid. But even Bella Hadid has friend groups that are not supermodel-filled and the internet is still obsessed with them. So maybe it's not just me who is looking for picture-perfect ideas of friendship online and on TV screens.
We grew up consuming TV shows and coming-of-age movies that could never truly capture how hard friendships are, especially as we get older. And social media is just another highlight reel when it comes to friendships. The reality of it is, that as much as I love the Bella Hadid and Devon Lee Carlson friendship, I do not know what fights they get into or how much they see each other regularly. We were fed the narrative that you will find a handful of decent friends and you will be set forever. And as nice as that would be, it's not true. Friendship is hard work. Even finding one good friend is like striking gold. And how many times can you really find gold?
Every time I think I’m okay with having “just one or two good friends” I think of the sleepover scene from the 2008 movie The Clique. The middle school-aged girls are lying in a circle in their sleeping bags, one of them asks “Would you rather be a friendless loser or a person with tons of friends who secretly hate you?” If I am being totally honest I go back and forth between my answers because on the days when I feel like a friendless loser, having friends who secretly hate me does not seem all bad. I do not have the right answer. Although, I do know that both of them seem like a lonely life. So until I figure it out I will stick to my fluctuating friend groups and my TV shows.
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