The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

Speaking of friendship: there is an account on Twitter whose owner sticks up for friendship and sometimes blogs against the Christian obsession with marriage or the stupid Billy Graham Rule. That account is (Link): Forbidden Friendships (@MenWomenFriends)

The Atlantic has a very long article about societal shifts concerning the delay or demise of marriage and the rise of female friendships, as they discuss it in the context of some television show called “Broads” that is about two lady friends. I’ve never seen the show.

(Link):  Broad City and the Triumph of the Platonic Rom-Com by Megan Garber

Excerpts:

The show’s new season asks what its heroines, Abbi and Ilana, are to each other: friends? Partners? More?

….Abbi and Ilana share, basically, what a lot of young women—and young men—share in this age of delayed marriage and emergent adulthood and platonic roommates and geographic peripateticism and economic prosperity and economic uncertainty: a friendship that occupies the psychic space that used to be devoted to spouses and children.

While the (Link): marriage plot may still, dissolved and distended, drive many of Hollywood’s cultural products, Broad City reflects friendship’s age-old, but also new, reality: The show is suggesting that its heroines are already, effectively, married. To each other.

…The women’s partnership [which is platonic; they don’t have sex with each other], crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance; they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. They are each other’s Happily Ever After. The pair, as Ann Friedman (Link): put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives.

Which makes Broad City, on the one hand, yet more evidence that we are living, as The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg (Link): put it, in “a golden age of female friendship.”

People Really Hack Me Off (Part 2) The Clueless Christian Who Likes To Send You Upbeat Updates About Himself In Reply To Your Announcement of Your Mother’s Death (ex friend of mine)

People Really Hack Me Off (Part 2) The Clueless Christian Who Likes To Send You Upbeat Updates About Himself In Reply To Your Announcement of Your Mother’s Death (ex friend of mine)

(July 2018 update below)

I had this friend who I shall call “Douglas” (not his real name) who I met while in college.

This post will probably not be nearly as long as (Link): Part 1 of this series about the ingrate and hot head, Ellen (the other ex friend of mine).

Doug is about four or five years older than I am.

Doug is a devout Christian guy and a Republican. (Though he didn’t fixate on politics and go nuts about it the way Ellen did, who I mentioned in my last post.)

Like almost everyone I am blogging about in this series, he was self absorbed.

People Really Hack Me Off (Part 1) The Hypocritical, Constantly Angry, Christian Ingrate (ex friend of mine)

People Really Hack Me Off  (Part 1) The Hypocritical, Constantly Angry, Christian Ingrate (ex friend of mine)

I normally post about marriage, dating, and similar topics on this blog, but I wanted to talk about something else for now.

This post, and maybe future ones in this series, may contain strong language (expletives).

I don’t want any Christians reading this to leave complaints about the language. You are being forewarned there will be some strong language in this post, and probably any Part 2 or 3 I write.

It might be easier for me to divvy up the people and types of people I am angry at instead of tackling it all in one post.

The wider, common theme of this post (and perhaps future ones I do on this) has to do with people abandoning me in my time of greatest need, or people who treat me like trash and take from me, even though I spent years giving to them, and showing them compassion and was there for them in their time of crisis, but they did not return these gestures.

There’s been indifference and apathy to me and my situation, by church people, extended family, and some of these friends I am talking about in this post or in possible future posts.

To keep my anonymity intact, I will change around some details and names in the examples or stories I am telling.

Here is my first story.

I know this post will be very long, so you may get the feeling that this is a super huge deal in my life, but oddly, it’s not.

It’s rather minor, actually, it just takes me a long time to explain it. And to VENT about it.

But it does have me pissed off, still, months later.

It’s not that this incident or two alone in this post is huge and is what has me upset, it’s that it is a part of the smaller “drip – drip – drip” comprising the torrent of rain, and the ocean, and the sea, of consistent betrayal and pain other people have caused me the last few years.

I have – or had – an online friend.

We don’t really stay in touch anymore, our relationship is kind of vague and undefined at the moment.

We met in a forum several years ago. She is several years younger than I am. I think I may have mentioned her on this blog in a very old post or two.

I’m going to call her “Ellen.”

I have an older sister. I’ll call my older sister “Shirley,” which is not her real name.

I may do a separate post about Shirley in a future post.

All I will say for now is that Ellen and Shirley are very similar people. They have similar personalities.

So, when you read about “Ellen” here, just remember I’ve been dealing with this from an older sibling since childhood as well.

And good lord am I ever tired of both of them. I have had my fill.

Ellen and I became friends several years ago on a forum. We exchanged e-mail addresses and sometimes e-mailed each other.

Ellen would confide in me at times about her problems.

I was supportive of her. I would give her words of encouragement and just let her know I was listening and cared.

Ellen turned down my offer to give her a phone call once, when she was going through a very stressful time. I volunteered to phone her and just listen if she needed to vent or cry.

Ellen had financial problems for a few years, she shared with me that she is obese (she weighs 200 or more pounds).

Ellen also told me that she quit her one, old professional, full time, job in a fit of anger and regretted it.

Ellen says she wants a boyfriend, has never had a boyfriend, and worries she will never get one because of her excess weight.

Ellen told me she had student loan debts, and creditors kept hounding her all the time, and this went on for 2 or more years.

I was sympathetic to her during this time.

Ellen has a temper. She is almost always angry at someone or something.

If you visit this blog, recall you are not seeing a full picture of me. I may come across perpetually angry on my blog to you, but that is because I use this blog for the express purpose of venting about how singles are treated so poorly by churches.

Most often when I make blog posts here, I am not angry. I just come on to post a link and leave.

I’m not an angry person all the time.

As I crawl out of codependency the last couple of years, there has been some anger.

I have read content by psychologists who say it’s normal for someone coming out of codependency, like I am, to be intensely angry for a year or more as they work through their repressed anger.

But even in spite of that, and in spite of my ranty blog posts about singles and the church, I’m not an angry person at the core.

If I default to any negative emotions at all (when I am not on this blog), I am more inclined to become depressed or suffer anxiety, than I am to get angry or to act angry.

But my friend Ellen’s default emotional state and way of dealing with life  – and this is so true of my sister “Shirley” as well – is to stay angry and to explode in absolute rages from time to time.

Ellen is an angry person at her core. That is one of her defining qualities.