Your New Best Friend Is Your Ex's Ex

 

Not long after she entered graduate school, Molly* started dating Jim, a rather neurotic man who was notorious for sleeping around. He was the kind of guy who had issues with intimacy and ingrained sexism but tried to soften the blow with self-awareness. “I like you so much, but I couldn’t possibly be with you,” he’d say. “I’m so brainwashed by the patriarchy that I can only be attracted to women who are dumber than me with big breasts.”

It didn’t help that Jim was apparently still friendly with his ex-girlfriend, an “epic beauty” named Pam whom Molly would frequently see in the library. One day Molly stepped outside for a cigarette, and Pam followed her. Molly girded herself for an awkward situation, feeling the same kind of jealousy and intimidation she’d experienced in high school. But Pam immediately made it clear that she had other plans. “Are you dating Jim?” Pam asked. “That guy sucks and you seem really cool. Don’t let him treat you like garbage.”

“She really was, like, actively recruiting me to her coven. And it totally worked.”

To silently obsess about why a dude doesn’t like you, then have another awesome woman confirm that he’s the problem, not you, “is sooo validating,” Molly says. Pretty soon, their friendship transcended this shared negative experience. Long after Jim was out of the picture, the two women remained close. Pam became Molly’s “grad school ride-or-die friend.” She helped Molly get grants and edited her work and encouraged her. “She really was, like, actively recruiting me to her coven,” Molly says. “And it totally worked.” elle.com

Last year, Deux Moi facilitated some female solidarity when several women discovered they were all hooking up with the same celebrity. And recently, the entire internet had a front-row seat to this phenomenon when countless women on TikTok realized the same man had done them dirty with similar lovebombing-then-ghosting tactics.

The dustup quickly came under fire for needlessly piling on (and doxxing) a guy whose main crime was being inconsiderate. But several of his erstwhile Tinder matches agree that the silver lining of the whole debacle was connecting with each other, and possibly raising dating standards in the process. Shortly after the story went viral, one of the women told me she found herself in an immensely comforting group chat with two other women who’d been roped into the controversy, adding, “A lot of people put down women for gossiping,” but sometimes “it gives people the chance to identify something that might be of danger to them. It allows us to build solidarity among each other.”

Suzanne Degges-White, the chair of the Department of Counseling at Northern Illinois University and a co-author of Friends Forever: How Women and Girls Form Lasting Relationships, agrees that gossip can actually be a good thing. Historically, she says, “gossip is a survival mechanism where we’re sharing information that’s important to know…Gossip was designed to communicate social norms. It’s telling us what not to do, and it helps us know how to respond to a person who broke those social norms.”

Degges-White points out that gossip, much like female bonding over a romance gone bad, is distinctly gendered. When in a crisis, many of us, regardless of gender, tend to “befriend people we might not normally be friends with,” she says, but women in particular are socialized to deal with acute stress in a particular way. Studies have shown that women often transition from “fight or flight” to “tend and befriend” when they feel under threat. Men, on the other hand, often “don’t want to admit they were done wrong, because that’s an insult to their masculinity, and they don’t want to be painted as a victim,” she says. “That’s a socialization that guys don’t lose.”