Why It’s Important to Have Girlfriends You’re Not Related to

Usually when I talk about inspiring women, I often refer to my fuzzy ‘friend’ who is either a genuine buddy I’ve kept anonymous to avoid physical harm or a composite of my friends.

But in every blog where I talk about my ‘friend’, my two sisters are always peppered into the mix.

This is not only because they are exceptionally interesting people who have yet to work out the danger of confiding in a blogger, but also because I know them better than I know anyone else. Not only are we bound by genetics and geography, but they are also my best friends.

I am the middle of three sisters and there are few moments in my life where I can remember feeling friendless.

When the three of us are out on the town, people often comment in surprise at the thought of siblings socialising together of their own free will. Women regularly recoil in horror at the thought of working or playing with their sisters. In fact, many of them do not speak to their sisters at all or have a hostile or competitive relationship that they drag to every family function and unleash on the rellies like a rabid dog.

So I’m one of the lucky ones.

But there are some real drawbacks to having such a great bond with your sisters.

Not only do they have the spare key and can raid your wardrobe at their leisure, but such undemanding, eternal support can make you really lazy when it comes to developing your social skills.

When your Sister is your Best Friend, Bridesmaid, Flatmate, Drinking Buddy and Personal Assistant…

When I moved to London to work for a couple of years, one of the biggest hurdles was that I went solo.

The boyfriend at the time lasted a few weeks before retreating from the endless drizzle and ridiculous cost of living and then I was alone in a crappy bedsit with a hole in the window the size of a fist (not mine!) and a landlord who kept a padlock on the fridge and the TV cabinet.

I remember sitting on my frost-slick sleeping bag and thinking, “It would be okay if my sisters were here.”

But they were a 24-hour flight away and I could barely make rent, let alone afford long distance phone calls, so the crunch came in the form of my chattering teeth. I could either sit in my refrigerated prison and dream of going home or I could get out there and meet some surrogate sisters.

In many ways this was like going back to the first day of high school. And after years of being a lazy best-friend, my social skills were about as mature as an eighth-graders.

Developing your Sister-less Social Skills

So these are the hard-learned tips I had to put into place to get a girlie gang that didn’t share my surname:

• Learn to Listen - the reality is that long exposure to your sisters numbs your senses. When you can finish each other’s sentences from across the globe, you don’t usually need to develop your listening skills. But your friendship with your new best-friend relies on sharing information.

  Talking about myself was the easy bit for me - I tend to turn into Old Woman Storyteller when nervous - but actually sitting quietly and squirreling away new facts about my friend was far more important. According to my father, there’s no better bonding tool than being able to quote a woman back to herself.

• Go Out of Your Way - this is hard for a lazy best friend. You can laugh in your sister’s face when she asks you to go with her to a boot-scooting class, but the same doesn’t apply with your new best-friend. Similarly, it is a lot harder to pull out of catching up because it’s a rainy night or you’re feeling grouchy or there’s a documentary on cheese that you want to watch.

  Sisters will just roll their eyes, but a new best-friend might just decide that you’re not worth the effort either.

• Be Friends with Their Friends - I have had little regard for one of my elder sister’s friends since she gave me a chinese burn on the trampoline when I was six, but taking the moral high ground with your new best-friend’s friends may leave you standing alone on the top of a very chilly hill.

  The best way to play it is to show her old-girl network that you’re there to add to the fun, not to distract your new best-friend from her gang.

• Establish Boundaries - this tip is particularly important in the area of men! While sisters keen to nab or “share” their men seems to be commonplace in the movies, in reality this is a line that doesn’t even need to be drawn! With your new best-friend this boundary may not apply.

  Rules need to be agreed on all the things our competitive hearts desire - in my case this applied to the great rental that moved me from Zone 6 to Zone 3 and across the hall from a spunky South African model.

• Respect their Differences - as sisters, differences have been assimilated into the friendship from childhood. You hardly even recognise the quirks that set you apart. But your new best-friend is still an enigma. You’ve probably shared a few secrets and got up to a bit of mischief together, but most of us are like icebergs when we first form friendships: 90% of our personality is hidden beneath the surface.

  If you want to share your flaws in a hurry, try backpacking around Europe with them in August. You’ll either see the fur fly or your friendship will be cemented forever.

The reality is that there are no better girlfriends than sisters…
even when they have photos like this in their archives, that they dare to post on the Internet!

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