what would i be without my friends?
on babes (2024) and prioritizing your friends
one night in August, after a long day of getting ridiculously stoned with my partner and their cousin, we decided to watch Babes (2024).
the story kicks off pretty immediately: while best friends Dawn (Michelle Buteau) and Eden (Ilana Glazer) are doing their annual Thanksgiving tradition of hanging out together, Dawn goes into labor. Eden takes her to the hospital, contacts her husband (played by Hasan Minhaj), and is in the room during the birth. it’s a cute opening, exactly the thing i love to see: best friends since childhood with a seemingly unbreakable bond, sharing life's big and small moments.
we get the first hint that these cute and fun vibes will not last when Eden returns to the hospital room after picking up expensive sushi and is told by the nurse that visiting hours are over, unless you’re family. Eden tries to explain, but is shooed away.
with $500 sushi in tow, Eden embarks on the four-transfers subway odyssey back to Astoria. on this exaggeratedly long trip, she meets and bonds with Claude. they go back to her place, smash it and bang, then Claude disappears. Eden assumes that he ghosted her, which she is sad about, because she felt they had a real connection (i should note here that, much like Ilana in Broad City, Eden is a single-by-choice, girl fuckboi type. Claude is different, though.)
fast forward a month. while high on shrooms, Eden takes a bunch of pregnancy tests and they’re all positive! yikes! she tries to track Claude down through the STI testing clinic that they both frequent (hello, HIPAA?), and discovers that he died! the day after they had sex! double yikes!
while all that’s going on with Eden, Dawn is struggling with post-partum depression, her older son regressing after the arrival of the newborn, and trying to juggle work and parenting. in case it wasn’t clear, similar to Abbi and Ilana’s dynamic in Broad City, Eden is kind of a mess and Dawn is slightly more put together but not really, so Eden is Dawn’s vehicle to de-stress. she is absolutely flabbergasted that Eden wants to keep the baby, both because Eden is a mess and because parenting is hard and Not Fun.
okay, enough summarizing, you can go watch the movie or read the Wikipedia synopsis. the movie was fine. i actually let out a few chuckles, despite not really liking comedies (i hate fun.)
Babes (2024) really got me thinking–actually, i was already thinking, but the movie had me thinking harder–about friendship and how we prioritize it (or don’t) in our lives.
in case you didn’t know, i am a Queer Person™️ and Queer People™️ are all about community. or something, allegedly. but what does that even mean?
i have one friend group of polyamorous queer people, where we are always talking about buying a brownstone together. we talk about how there will be community kids and pets who will have their aunts and uncles and guncles and auncties in the same building as them! i think about how we will balance our different cleaning styles. i wonder how many of us are actually serious about it and when we’re gonna start saving for it.
but i also have friends who are in monogamous (and in some cases, cishet) relationships, who live with their partners, who are planning marriage, who mostly hang out with other couples, whose lives are very oriented around the Couple™️, who would roll their eyes and chuckle at my communal brownstone dreams.
and this is no shade to them at all! like, hi kettle, i’m pot. my partner and i have lived together, just the two of us and our pets, for the past 3 years. we’re probably gonna get married at some point.
but, for the most part, i’m an Eden. by that i mean, in the climax of the film–spoiler alert!–Eden and Dawn get into a big argument and Eden goes, “we’re family. We’re FAMILY” and the desperation in her voice cracks my heart in two. Dawn fully breaks my heart when she responds with, “i have my own family.”
TRIPLE YIKES! was my high ass sitting there crying at this silly, raunchy, pregnancy comedy movie? well, yes.
their argument started because Eden suggested that, instead of Dawn renting out her basement, perhaps Eden and her baby could move in with Dawn and her family (yes, Dawn owns a house with multiple floors in the Upper West Side. god i wish that were me, but in Bed-Stuy or Queens ‘cus Manhattan is yucky.)
their childhood dream was to live together, and Eden has been holding onto this dream all these years. Dawn thinks it is fucking laughable that Eden would even suggest this, and finds it childish that she has been holding onto this dream for so long.
and that made me so sad because, like, that is my dream. i want to live with my best friend and raise our kids together. but, more than that, i want to be thinking about my friends–i want to be considering my close friends when i’m making major life decisions. to me, it shouldn’t be a given that your romantic partner is your main/only priority and your friends are just, like, people you hangout with once a month and text or call once a week.
the irony in Dawn’s “i have my own family” response is that she was GOING THROUGH IT, and so was her husband. Eden ran a yoga studio outside of her apartment so she had a lot more flexibility, while Dawn was a dentist and her husband was Hasan Minhaj (i don’t remember what his job was, sorry!!) they couldn’t find childcare, she was depressed, and the only way she could decompress was by going on a babymoon with Eden. it feels like having Eden in her basement would’ve actually been great for Dawn, idk!
we are taught that what matters most is the Family Unit. Parents and Children. the Parents hire a Sitter (or ask the In-Laws) to watch the Children until the Children are school-aged. The Parents are active in their Children’s lives while also balancing all their other responsibilities, and they use the weekend and school break to bond by doing things as a Family Unit. if you ask for help (not counting your In-Laws, of course, because grandparents are contractually obligated to drop everything and watch their grandkids at a moment’s notice unless they still have jobs), you’ve failed. if there are other important adult relationships in your life, you’ve failed. There are no outsiders allowed–especially not any that are not biologically related to either Parent.
and even if kids aren’t involved, it still works this way. if you’re up for promotion but you have to move across the country, you check in with your partner, not your best friend of 20 years. if you and your partner are On the Rocks, you keep that shit to yourself because that’s between y’all and nobody else should ever have a say or opinion. and if you and your partner break up, well, you’re alone! you better hurry up and find the next one, because guess what? all your friends have their own partners, their own lives, their own families, and you don’t matter.
wait, what? i don’t matter? :-(
yeah. that’s what happens when you spend your entire adult life centering a romantic relationship and deprioritizing your friendships. even people who aren’t in relationships do this. example:
my partner and i were talking to one of their family members, who i perceive to have some fulfilling familial and platonic friendships. they were telling us how lonely they felt, how they felt no one really cared about them. when we asked what they needed from us and other people in their lives to feel like we cared, their response was basically, “i can’t get what i need from you, because i’ll never be a priority to you, because you have each other.”
my partner and i looked at each other like, “🤔”
here we were, offering ourselves, and we were rejected because this person believed that we could not even attempt to meet their needs or make more room for them in our lives, because we already have each other and that is supposed to be our only priority. if you are only allowed to have one priority, then…i’ve been using my planner wrong for years, chile! i have at LEAST 3-5 daily priorities on my to-do list!
on the flip side, we all know people in relationships who are absolutely miserable, who put up with some hot doodoo garbage behavior, whose partner honestly suck ass, and we know they probably know it, but they deal with it because being single is worse than being miserable. why be lonely alone, when you can be lonely in a relationship?
and, again. HI, KETTLE, I’M POT. i am a homebody with anxiety who hates being outside by themselves once it gets dark out, so my partner is the person i spend the most time around. but i also text my best friend of nearly 22 years on an almost daily basis–and i don’t mean a quick check in, i mean paragraphs of discourse and 5 minute long voice notes and sharing articles back and forth. if we go more than a few days without texting, i get a little sad tbh (Ashley if you’re reading this, text me back. jk, we were literally texting all day!)
i am also an Eldest Daughter™️ (gender neutral) so my younger siblings take up a lot of my brain and heart and calendar space. like, i legitimately thought i would not be able to survive my younger sibling’s move upstate for college (it’s been over a month since we moved them in. happy to report that i’m still alive!)
my point is: maybe it’s because i’m Queer™️, maybe it’s because my mom mostly raised us herself, maybe it’s because i have built-in best friends that i’ve been prioritizing in my life decisions since they were born seventeen and fourteen years ago, but, idk, we should rethink centering our lives around the couple.
not only is it increasingly difficult to maintain the nuclear family model–which, tbh, was never really attainable for most of the population anyway–isn’t it just nice to have friends around all the time? isn’t it nice to be able to rely on more than one person? isn’t it nice to extend care to more than one person? isn’t it nice to be so full of love that you can’t contain it, but you don’t have to, because your best friend lives 3 blocks away so you can stop by their place for a little chat whenever?
IDK, maybe i’m naïve. maybe i’m young. but i don’t want to envision a future where i’m seeing my friends less than i already do, where the only people that are supposed to matter to me are romantic partners and kids. and look, i know my polyamorous baddies have been preachin’ and prayin’ and sayin’ this for decades now, and they’re right, but a lot of times, romantic relationships are still prioritized even among polyamoarous people. having multiple romantic partners that you schedule your life around is great, yes, but what about your friends?
until next time,
jaysen h.g.
P.S:
hi. i know it’s been 6 months since my last post. i was going to, like, develop a schedule where i post twice a month, and one would be full of Research™️ and Citations™️, and this was supposed to be my researchy post for October, but YOU KNOW WHAT! YOU KNOW WHAT?
my loved ones have been telling me to stop putting so much pressure on myself and just write. and i am finally listening. :) i do eventually want to have a balance between more casual type vibes (i.e this) and more Galaxy-Brained™️ posts but, for now, what’s most important is that i just write and post and, hopefully, you read and comment and share. ;)