Our female friendships are arguably the most precious (and complex) relationships we have. So what do we do when those bonds turn corrosive? Author Camilla Way investigates…

Last year, an email landed in my inbox that left me reeling. As I stared back at the familiar name I felt something close to panic. It was a message from Rachel*, my ex best friend – someone I’d known since childhood but who, for nearly a decade, I’d hoped never to see again. The cheerful, breezy message – when I finally opened it – suggested we meet up. “It’s been too long,” she wrote, “be so nice to see you.” And though my first, rather childish reaction was, “Chuh. No chance”, something made me hesitate.

I was aware of the irony considering the novel I was writing, Watching Edie: a psychological thriller centring around the mother of all toxic friendships between two women, Heather and Edie, which has terrifying repercussions. While Rachel and my problems were thankfully not quite so dramatic, the reason for our fallout could also be traced back to our adolescence – and that age-old chestnut of a stolen boyfriend. Although, on the surface at least, our friendship recovered for a while, there remained throughout our 20s an underlying resentment manifesting itself in juvenile one-upmanship and tit for tat bitchiness that was entirely absent from any of my other friendships. It was claustrophobic and exhausting; we needed to break free of each other, and after a huge fight one night in our early 30s over something innocuous, that’s exactly what we did.

Yet, a decade on I realised I had missed her. For over 20 years we’d each been the person the other could call at 2am when the sh*t hit the fan, and there had been many, many highs to the lows. Plus I was itching with curiosity: that intervening decade had been seismic for me; a series of life changing events – leaving my job as a magazine production editor, writing three novels, becoming a mother of twins – that had altered me considerably. Had she changed too? Or would meeting up again suck us back into the negative power play of the past? Staring at my inbox, my finger hovered between Reply and Delete.

Forever friends?

Lena Dunham once said, “I think of my best friendship as like a great romance of my young life,” and from Ab Fab’s Patsy and Edina to Taylor Swift’s ‘squad’, popular culture isn’t short of reminders of the joy our girlfriends can bring. A study by Relate concluded that our friendships act as shock absorbers when times are hard while several scientific reports have found having friends helps you fight illness, slows ageing and prolongs life. Yet when a friendship goes wrong (as 84% of women revealed they’ve experienced**) it can have huge repercussions, affecting our mental and physical health, leaving us feeling isolated and anxious. But what qualifies as a negative friendship, why do they happen, and what can we do when we find we’re in the grip of one?

Friends without benefits: why is it that some of our closest friends often become our worst enemies?