Given that the main way I lure people to these blogs is through sharing the link on my social media pages – sometimes passive-aggressively, but always enthusiastically – then you’re likely to already know that last week marked a year since I moved down to London. A lot has changed in my life in a very short period of time, but the details of that aren’t what’s grabbed my attention over the last few days: I’ve been more interested in a pattern that appeared in the responses to that post.

In social situations and within popular culture, there’s always a lot of dialogue about romantic relationships and the ways in which they can affect a person’s state of mind or self-esteem. But when I was in the car with my friend the other day, speaking about how our individual self-esteems (not sure if that’s the grammatically correct way to put it, but stick with me) have been impacted by others, the conversation focused a lot on the friendships, rather than romantic relationships. Fair enough, I’m yet to have a ‘serious’ romantic relationship, but I’ve had enough run-ins to leave me feeling shitty at points and still, the hits to the confidence and sense of personal security which have lasted the longest have been thrown by close friends. Often, female friends.

My comfort zone has always been around groups of men because I’ve got three older brothers, I’m close with my Dad and my Granddad, and within my wider family, I only had male cousins until the age of eight. So, even though I was equally close to my Mum, Grandmas, and Aunties, what I’ve always known is for women to be the minority in social spaces. Therefore, when I went to school and made friends with groups of girls I lapped it up because it wasn’t what I was used to. However, there were also plenty of times when I didn’t understand the young girls around me. I would be in a tight-knit female friendship group one second, then the next somebody was chatting to other girls about me behind my back, I’d get upset, not know how to deal with it, and then go home crying to the comfort of mostly male voices and opinions.

My parents raised all of us to be feminists; to love and appreciate the beauty of femininity. I was encouraged to lean into my femininity as much as I wanted to, whilst also receiving a pretty honest education on the issues that being born a woman brings up when you enter the wider world. I’ve consistently tried to feel as comfortable around women as I do men, but when some of those female friendships have turned sour, I’ve been hurt far more deeply than I have by any of my male friends.

But this brings me to the Instagram post I made the other day about my achievements since moving down to London. I received loads of lovely messages of encouragement from friends and strangers, but what I didn’t expect to see was the number of women in my life who chose to publicly express their support of what I do. And then when I thought about the relationships I have with those women, I realised that for the first time (I think, ever), all of the friendships I have with women right now are honest and healthy. There’s not a single woman close to me whose friendship makes me feel insecure, judged, or observed.

Female friendships are so fulfilling, but the insidious nature of patriarchy means that often we go into social situations immediately skeptical of each other. We’re conditioned to judge, shame, distrust, and criticize so much that forming a friendship where you know that the woman sitting across from you won’t ever turn on you or say something foul behind your back isn’t easy. I don’t believe that the tendency towards suspicion is the fault of the women themselves, it’s just an effect of a misogynistic world, but nothing upsets me more than seeing women tearing each other down. You’re not going to like everyone, irrespective of their gender, but sexist acts towards women by women feel like a deeper kind of betrayal.

We’re all guilty of not being the nicest version of ourselves at times – everyone has bad days, and sometimes certain people just wind you up. However, as I grow into the version of myself I am now, I realise that I’ve not always felt that safe in my friendships and I’ve not known how to fix it. I might always be the one to walk toward the group of lads in the room because that’s how I first learned to socialise, but now I’m happy to write that I will no longer say that I prefer the company of men over women. Because once you crack that ‘how to find a female friendship free from (lots of ‘f’s) judgment and suspicion’, those relationships start to feel like the most important ones you’ll ever have.