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Do You Have Friendship Envy? Here’s why ‘Girl Squads’ Don’t Determine Your Self-worth

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Do you ever see a group of friends hanging out in a bar or sharing lipgloss in the loos and wish you had a girl squad like them? Or do you listen to mates talking about their best friend from like, forever, and wished you had someone to share your life with who is as close as a sister, but perhaps without the sibling rivalry?

Having a girl squad has become a bit of a status symbol, and it’s natural to feel serious FOMO when you are bombarded with Instagram images of glamorous friends looking like they’ve stepped out of an advertising campaign, living their best life with captions like #BFF, while you are curled up in your fleecy onesie watching repeats of Friends.

When you see celebs like Gigi Hadid and Kendell Jenner with their supermodel girl squad, who would rather forget their Fendi bags than their friends, it’s natural to feel a pang of jealousy or what’s known as friendship envy. But before you beat yourself up about it, friendship envy doesn’t make you a bad person.

Just like how during lockdown, it felt like everyone was making bread and doing Couch to 5K without breaking a sweat, while we were struggling to get out of our PJs before midday, post lockdown, it feels like there is pressure to make up for lost time and go out with partying all the time.

But it’s hard to get yourself out there when you don’t have a wing woman, and the loneliness we felt over lockdown didn’t end once the restrictions were finished.

Social media and celebrities have set some serious friendship goals, but how realistic are they? Ultimately, Instagram only shows a snapshot of people’s lives, but sometimes that picture perfect group can be less girl squad and more Mean Girls.

So why are we so tied by the idea of being part a girl squad even when those relationships become negative? Psychologist Lilly Sabir explained: “Our sense of identity and emotional wellbeing is constructed from the groups we belong to.

If we lack these social connections, it affects our self-esteem. We feel friendship envy because so much of our confidence is gained from us knowing who we ‘belong’ to.

“Whether it’s what you do or who you want to be, it will come from sourcing friends that share and influence your own ideas. If we lack those social connections which also approve parts of our personality, we can feel disappointed and lonely.

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“Before social media, no one else knew what a typical Saturday afternoon with friends would look like. Now you see what friends, old class mates, exes are doing and group selfies are the way we show people who we are. This amount of access is creating even more importance around the friends we have and how they shape our identities.”

So what can we do about it? “Identify the triggers, then ask yourself why you feel that way” Lilly added, “ Then set goals to focus that energy onto enhancing your own identity, which will allow you to gain the confidence to engage with others and seek validating friendships.”

Ultimately, being part of a girl squad should be empowering, but if it’s not, it’s better to do an Elsa and let it go. Before seeking validation from others, we need to find it within ourselves and be our own girl squads.

This originally appeared on Glamour UK

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