Are Best Girlfriends The New Aspirational Relationship?

Or another stick to beat us with?

IN MANY WAYS, my close friendships with women are what you'd expect from TV shows like Sex and the City or The Golden Girls: emotionally intimate and involved, fierce and sassy.

What these shows get right about female friendship is that our bonds run deep and strong. But they also tend to idealise these relationships.

We see friends whose lives are so tightly entwined that they materialise at each other's doors whenever needed; a ride-or-die girl group who are at your side for life.

Here, close girlfriends are filling the role we'd traditionally expect of a spouse. And with marriage in decline, it feels like more of us are turning to female friendship as the new allsustaining, aspirational relationship.