I really wanted to dig into the complexity of these hyper close kinds of friendships and it felt like I would not do justice to them if all I was doing was showing all the shiny parts and not showing the ways that these friendships can also have

difficult edges to them or the way people misinterpret them and the hardships that come with

having an unrecognized friendship. Love. This is unladie like, I'm Kristen.

Today's episode takes me back to 2017 to a polarizing HBO show called Girls. Yes, we are going to very briefly

detour into Lena Dunum territory. I can't really tell you what all happens in the

sixth and final season of girls but I do remember sitting down and watching the finale and for a brief moment loving what I was seeing on screen.

A spoiler alert, question mark.

By this point,

Lena Dunum's character, Hannah, has a newborn baby.

She has decided to raise it on her own.

Of course, she is having a lot of trouble figuring out how to make that work,

and so, her aimless, selfish, best friend Marnie

seems to have turned over a new leaf and is offering to co-parent with

Hannah. You think you have a lot of friends, right? Yeah, who's here? Who's here?

I'm here. I win. I'm your best friend. I'm the best at being your friend. I love you the most.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Fuck yeah. And it made my little heart sing because it's a storyline that we just don't really ever see of two friends coming together to decide to co-parent a child, a non-sexual but romantic in its own way, kind of friendship.

But I was so sad by the end of the episode because we knew that this co-parenting fantasy was only that

a fantasy, that it wasn't actually going to happen, that these two friends were likely going to

part ways and find their own lives probably quite separate from each other.

...