Saving the misery for your best friend

Women expect our best friends to be there in times of misery. We want to be able to contact our friends 24 hours a day, as if they were the fire department or QVC.

We expect our pals to soothe, comfort and heal; basically, good friends are Neosporin for the soul.

They'll respond when we break up with somebody, when a kid asks for bail or when a beloved pet dies. They don't shrug it off, tsk-tsk, or say they'll ring back later. They show up with wine, cash or a shovel.

So why is it that we don't always trust our best friends with good news? Why is it often harder to announce, "I got a fabulous raise!" than it is to confess, "I took a cut in pay!"

Why is it that women lead conversations, even (or perhaps especially) with those closest to us by rattling off our current insecurities and vulnerabilities?

If you want to get into argument with a woman, just tell her she looks good, because she's going to explain to you for the next 45 minutes why you're wrong. She will contradict you if you give a compliment. She might actually punch you in the jaw if you say something genuinely flattering about one of her achievements.

Just listen to a woman welcoming another woman into her house. The place could be immaculate; you could perform neurosurgery on the floor. That's how clean it is. But she will always apologize for what a wreck the place is, right?

The stainless steel will be so brilliantly polished you can see through time, but she's showing you a cup left from this morning's coffee in the sink. You can't actually see the sink because of the glare from the shining plutonium fixtures, so she'll drag you over to prove that she's messy.

She believes she owes you an apology. All she sees is a mess. And believe me, she's not faking it. Women apologize and we mean it. But half the time we're apologizing for old stuff: the good host might really be seeing the chaos of the house she grew up in, or worrying about the upstairs closet, which she is not going to show you.

Or she might just be thinking about the unsorted and unruly nature of her inner life and believe that that's manifested somehow in her perfectly organized house.

Men? They don't apologize. A guy has a goat living in his house, eating the trash, and he tells you not get in the goat's face because he has a temper. That's how he welcomes you to his home.

(I'm not saying that men can't be neat. My husband's garage — yes, the garage is his, although my car is allowed to have sleepovers as long as it's clean and doesn't leave a wet patch — is as well kept as MOMA. He has art on the walls and tools are placed in alphabetical order.

This is no man-cave; this is a shrine to testosterone.) The trouble is that every woman believes she got to where she is by pretending to be somebody she is not. And so we're uneasy.

Is there an opposite of schadenfreude? You know: not where you're laughing at the misfortune of others, but you're feeling just a sneaking, small bit awful about the happiness of someone you otherwise adore?

I'm not talking about something as basic as envy; this is more complicated. It's the feeling you get when your best friend is losing weight (when you're not), falls madly in love (when you're not), or wins Powerball (when you've been playing every week for 26 years and she bought one lousy ticket simply to break a 20 — not that you're bitter).

It's at these moments you offer one of those smiles so unnatural it looks as it were put there by an undertaker. It expresses "I love you but — why you? Why not me?"

I suspect that unworthy thought has crept, unbidden, into the hearts of saints. Unlike the cup in the sink, however, it's the one sin for which a woman can never apologize.

We can only hope our friends will love us anyway.

Gina Barreca
The Hartford Courant
(TNS)

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Gina Barreca is a columnist for The Hartford Courant.