My husband asked me last night who my best friend is. I said, “You.” He pushed. “No. Like, a girlfriend.”
The honest answer is complicated.
My best friend died by suicide several years ago. We had been inseparable for more than half our lives when she decided to exit, stage left.
Losing her didn’t just leave a hole — it left a question I’m still answering.
I don’t think that question is simply “why is it so hard to make friends as an adult?” That’s the story we tell. The real point (or concern) is something else.
Making friends isn’t the hard part. Show up to the same places consistently — a bar, a community pool, a farmers market, a neighborhood book club — and you’ll accumulate friends. Casual ones. The kind that keep loneliness at bay.
But casual is not the same as close.
Deep friendship requires something harder to manufacture: shared struggle, confessed vulnerability, the cumulative weight of time spent showing up for each other.
You can’t rush it. You can’t outsource it. And you absolutely cannot find it on an app.
Men, for what it’s worth, seem to have made peace with the casual version. Ask a man about his best friend’s new baby and you’ll learn the gender. That’s it. No weight, no birth story, no middle-of-the-night update.
Just: “Had the baby. Boy…I think.” And he’ll be entirely content with this arrangement.
And hey, if a football game and a shared meme is enough to sustain a friendship for thirty years, good for them.
But something different has happened to women. And it’s worth calling out.
A hundred years ago, women didn’t just have friends. They had infrastructure.
In the early 20th century, women held up enormous amounts of household and community life — cooking, preserving, nursing, stretching budgets, managing children, and maintaining the family’s social standing — all without the systems we take for granted now. One economic history estimate puts household work at 78 hours per household per week in 1900.
These were not women of leisure. They were unpaid operations managers.
But from that work came something we’ve quietly lost: each other.
Because no one woman could do it alone, they didn’t try to. They traded labor, passed down remedies, shared food, issued warnings, and showed up unannounced at each other’s doors because that was simply what you did as a polite person.
The woman next door, the aunt down the street, the older church lady who knew what to do when a baby wouldn’t stop coughing — this was the network. This was life.
Women’s clubs formalized it. Between the 1870s and 1920s, these clubs built libraries, funded schools, pushed public health reform, advocated for child labor laws, and created leadership pipelines in a world that shut women out of formal power.
There were also home demonstration clubs — funded under the 1914 Smith-Lever Act — teaching canning, nutrition, food safety, sanitation, and household efficiency. Older women taught younger women how to run a household, read a social situation, survive a marriage, treat an illness without a doctor twenty miles away.
Now we buy them an espresso machine that costs several days’ salary and wish them well.
At the turn of the last century, women taught each other how to operate in a world that gave them all the responsibility and none of the authority.
What We Traded for “Freedom”
Women today have things our great-grandmothers would have marched for — careers, financial independence, legal standing, the ability to leave a bad marriage without becoming a social pariah.
These aren’t small things. No one wants to romanticize a world where women had no exit.
But we traded the support structure for freedom.
The two-hour commute replaced the neighbor. The meal delivery app replaced the casserole. The parenting group replaced the genuine friendship, at least until your kids age out of the same activity, at which point those connections quietly fall away.
We form communities of convenience and then wonder why we feel alone.
The modern work culture hasn’t helped. It rewards individual achievement over collective care. Competition over collaboration. Being impressive over being present.
Women absorbed those values right alongside their male counterparts and then most of us came home to the second shift.
A century ago, women gathered because they had to. Now we have to choose to.
And few of us have the time and energy to make that choice.
The grief is silent. It looks like mindlessly scrolling on social media feeling less than and wondering why you don’t have those things, that relationship, or those trips.
The night my husband asked the best friend question, I didn’t have a clean answer. I have women I love being around and those who make me laugh. I have a friend or two who can tell me what to do when and how to line my eyes to not make them appear droopy.
But the woman I would have called first is gone.
And I have not yet built what she and I had, because that kind of thing takes decades and luck and an uncommon willingness to let someone see you at your worst.
And it takes the emotional energy to dedicate to it. It also takes giving up recuperation time to invest in deepening connections. We have a choice to do this in a way our ancestors didn’t. For them connections were necessary to survival. For us, it’s something we have to make time for or fit in around the other responsibilities in our lives.
So where does that leave us?
I think we know what we’ve lost. I’m less sure we know what it would take to get it back.
What do you think?