'I'm 31, and I've never been part of a "girl gang". I can't help feeling sad about it.'

It seems like a lot of television shows nowadays are all about celebrating platonic friendships.

And don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely all for moving away from this insistence that romantic love should be the ultimate goal for every person. But when I watch these shows, there is a part of me that can't help but feel a little sad and wistful.

This is mostly because, outside of high school, I've never had a 'girl gang.'

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I have friends, yes – friends I love and adore with my whole heart. But the friends I have exist in different, separate parts of my life – we don't all hang out together.

I hang out with them one-on-one mostly and a lot of them haven’t even met each other. That's not through some nefarious plan to keep them apart on my behalf, it's just because, like I said, they're friends who I've met in different avenues of my life that, for some reason or another, just haven't intersected.

So, this means that the 'girl gang' dynamic has always eluded me. 

What is a 'girl gang', I hear you ask? 

Well, the media tells me the 'girl gang' is a group of usually four or five women who are bound by platonic love to be there for each other through the ups and downs of life. 

They each bring a unique, different personality to the group of friends and, if the television shows and movies are to be believed, their lives are filled with brunch catch-ups, cocktail nights and takeaway fuelled get-togethers at someone's apartment or house. Think Sex and The City, Everything I Know About Love - even Charlie's Angels. 

Look, I know that some of this is fictionalised and the majority of people aren't having girl gang brunches every weekend – real life doesn't allow for that – but the existence of a 'girl gang' is still very real. 

I see them in their groups at breakfast or in clusters at clubs and they always look, well, so fun.

I know I'm not the only one who grapples with the lack of a gang of friends. But what is it about the 'girl gang' that appeals to me and others? What is it about the idea of having a group of friends, as opposed to singular friendships, that seems like the goal? I am fully satisfied by the friendships I have; and yet still I feel lacking in some way for not having that cluster of friends in a group.  

Could it be nothing more than the remnants of the high school mentality? At 31, I'd like to think I'd shaken off that sort of stuff, but it might just be that I'm still thinking like a high schooler; thinking that belonging to a clique is so much better than just being in a two-person friendship.

Or is it just the basic human desire to belong to a community? Humans are naturally wired to crave connection to others, and being considered the part of a group or social circle can go a long way towards satisfying this need. 

If we look at the research around friendships, the academic Susan Degges-White reported that we need three to five friends to feel happy in life. When I dig deep into her work and the reporting around it, nowhere can I find anything that says that these three to five friends need to exist in a singular group. The only pre-requisite I can see to these three to five people bringing you life satisfaction is that the relationships need to be close and intimate. 

The friendships that I do have are close and supportive; I feel I can reach out to them during life's toughest moments and that they will be there for me. A lot of the articles I looked through in writing this piece suggested that a desire for a big group of friends is because the friendships you do have are lacking – but I don't think this is always the case. I think that's a simplistic and reductionist view to take.

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I think our longing to have the 'girl gang' we see on our television and movie screens is pushed by just that – the fact that we see if so often. When something is pushed onto us as the 'norm' or 'to be desired' it’s only natural for us to feel like failures or less than when we don’t have it. 

When people like me mention this, the tendency seems to be for others to push back on us with some derision, telling us to "live our lives for us" and "who cares what's on social media/television/movies" – which is all well and good, but doesn't acknowledge how difficult it is to live life wholly unaffected by said social media, television and movies. 

Certain things have a way of getting under your skin, perhaps tapping into a deep-seated insecurity you weren't even aware was there. That little insidious voice that measures and compares your life against the - admittedly curated or entirely fictionalised - lives of others and finds you lacking. If people can understand that societal pressures can drive women to unhealthy lengths to achieve some idealised standard of beauty, can they not also understand that pressures might drive people in other aspects of their lives – like, say, the personal friendships they have? 

What this speaks to, I think, is a need for us to rewrite the narrative around friendship; let's have a show where the protagonist has a childhood friend, and then a work friend, and then the friend who lives around the corner, and they're all equally important and lovely but she doesn't have to see them all at once and, heck, maybe they haven't even met. 

Let's highlight the one-on-one catch-ups, the two-person brunches, the intimate drinks where it's just you and your friend from around the corner.  

For more from Shaeden Berry, you can find her on Instagram @berrywellthanks

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