The Anatomy of a Girl Crush

I have never once heard of male friends 'breaking up'. They might have a big fistfight, but at least they maintain the dignity to let a friendship that is over just fade away.

Women, on the other hand, usually turn it into a melodrama, one that often culminates in the ever-popular email tell-off. Jan Yager, author of Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives, advises against this: 'Email has made it too easy to express thoughts and feelings that once you hit 'send' you may regret.'

I had a friend named Ruth, who I once would have described as my best friend. Ruth was a professional mentor I had a girl crush on, who then became an actual friend. I admired both her giant brain and the coppery red hair that fell in perfect ringlets to cover it. I had never cared for her controlling, perpetually unemployed husband, but since I also had a controlling, perpetually unemployed husband, I didn't give it much thought at the time.

When I left my marriage, she was the only friend I had that was against it, and that was the beginning of the end. I should have seen that the friendship was partly based on us both having unhappy personal lives.

When I got into a new, healthy relationship, she couldn't bear to be around me. She had told me when I divorced, 'I don't want to hear all your little stories of dating. Save that for your other girlfriends.' Apparently if I wasn't going to stay unhappily married, as she was, I was to keep quiet about my new life. My personal happiness, which every other significant person in my life had celebrated, was keenly painful to her.

So, she 'broke up' with me. Oddly, it was more painful than my divorce, but maybe because I had seen the divorce coming. It ended with an email from her, in all caps, telling me to `STAY AWAY FROM OUR HOUSE!!!!' It was the email equivalent of screaming, and it was so unlike Ruth that it shocked me.

Keeping girl crushes in check
So what did I learn from all this?
I think because my relationship with Ruth began as a crush, I was never willing to examine its inherent flaws. That's just what I used to do with boyfriends, and then a husband. So my advice is: Have all the girl crushes you want on amazing famous women if it helps you to get in touch with your fearlessness. But if you have a girl crush in real life, and it becomes a friendship, make sure the primary school behaviour ends there - and do the hard work to make the friendship work.

And never send a break-up email that's in all caps, ever. Unless you're - I don't know - 12.