The Sister Code and Friendship

Lately I have been thinking of the only two times that I have actively dissolved friendships in my entire life. I take my friendships very seriously. People who I consider friends are very special to me and once I make a place for them in my heart, there is very little they can do to make me not love them, or give up on them, or walk away from them, and in me they have a rock solid support system. I am fiercely loyal to my friends, extremely unconditional, and while sometimes my friends might drive me nuts, or get on my last nerve, I love them just the same because I am sure they forgive me for all the ways I am flawed and continue to be. Friends are priceless to me. Perhaps we don't get to choose our family or maybe we do, but friends we can make an active choice, and I have been enormously lucky to attract fantastic people in my life as friends. 

There are friends I have lost because our lives got busy or we had drifted apart, or moved away from our shared lives or interests that brought us together. However, whenever we reconnected, these friends and I shared a positive relationship and could pick up where we left off. But I have only actively dissolved  friendship twice. The first time I dissolved a friendship was when I was in my 20s and the last time I did the same was last summer. The first time was someone I have known in university and the last one was someone from SL. Both times the reasons were the same. Boundaries crossed, sisterhood code violated, and trust broken. 

Many people I know have this sisterhood code that we don't go after our girlfriend's current man or past partners. Both times, these two women violated that code in ways that hurt me deeply and broke trust so irreparably that I couldn't consider them friends anymore. My friends and I don't flirt inappropriately with our current partners or past ones, not just because we don't want to hurt each other, but just that we hold ourselves in higher regard than that and know that our options for flirting or partnering exceeds beyond our friends' circle and that we don't have to be entertained with each other's leftovers in some incestuous circuitous ways. Our sense of boundary is strong and while we all love to have fun, tease each other and our partners, we have always been able to respect boundaries of appropriateness. We never had to have a conversation with each other what such boundary ought to be like. It is as if we just knew. 

Yet, in SL, I see instances where people who call each other friends seem to cross these boundaries repeatedly, thoughtlessly. I am sure such boundary crossings happen in RL too, except I don't know any women in my RL circle who do that. I wonder what sense of worth one derives from getting attention from someone who is partnered to someone else, where one can at best expect to be a dirty little secret, the other woman, the guilt-inducing one, the one who unbalances, the one who would never be worth it for getting the honor, respect, and acknowledgment that she very well could richly deserve. 

I fill up with a sadness and empathy for women who hunch over their keyboards, night after night, day after day, typing text on a computer screen, vying for attention from men who are not committed to or interested in them, waiting for a text to pop up from these involved men, just so for that one moment they could feel that they mattered, and was deserving of his time, his connection, albeit polite and superficial. If I could, I would remind these women that they are worth much more than they think they deserve and that they deserve someone who would pay attention to them primarily, and not use them as a sideshow in their lives, a temporary distraction, entertainment, but one who would acknowledge these women as legitimate partners, forsaking all others (polyamorous relationships notwithstanding). To these women I would say that it is time that they open themselves up to better options than what they have been in the past, and that to not be afraid to take that risk, to be vulnerable, and they too can feel like princesses to their daddies, instead of going for the ones who already have their own princesses to dote on. 

Here's my wish for all. Let there be love, light, and compassion in everyone's lives who need it and even those who don't need it. Let there be companionship that makes one soar and solitude that makes one reflect on past patterns to collapse them. Let there be healing. Let there be cleansing. Let there be forgiveness of self and others. And let there be multiple earth-shattering orgasms. Because without that, we have nothing. :)