Reply to Breaking up with my toxic mom group (Ashley Tisdale essay)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It just seems exhausting that middle age women still have cliques. [/quote]

What is weird to me is that cliques actually seem more prevalent in my 40s than they did when I was in high school. There was friend drama in HS but it wasn't this passive aggressive exclusion or these weird hierarchies. It would more run of the mill, like (making this up) Katie and Jessie were best friends and then Jessie decided to do the school play instead of marching band and Katie felt hurt. But even in a situation like that, most of the time people would just talk it out and make up and it would be fine. It was just kids figuring their lives out and having some growing pains, but it usually wasn't malicious.

There are more mean 40 year old women than mean 17 year old girls, at least in my experience. It's really sad.[/quote]

I have definitely had the opposite experience.  I very much related to “Mean Girls” and this rigid social structure in high school.  
Do you think part of the reason you fell into this as an adult was that you had such an idyllic adolescence?  Like maybe if you don’t see this stuff and get your heart broken by it when you are 17, you don’t automatically spot it and know to stay clear in your 30’s.   
 
[/quote]

PP here. I don't know that my HS experience was idyllic, I actually come from a family with real issues and had a family member attempt suicide when I was young and struggled with my mental health in HS. But yeah, friendships were more straightforward. It's not that everyone got along or no one was ever mean, but more that it was transparent and people were not manipulative and back stabby.

And yeah, I truly did not know what to do with adult women who would claim to be close friends and then spread nasty rumors about me. Before it happened, I would have told you that was a dumb trope about women and only happened in movies and TV.

Did you grow up in the DC area? I read that the woman who wrote the sociology book that Mean Girls is based on (Queen Bees and Wannabes) did a lot of her research in this area and worked with a lot of girls at area private schools and wealthy public schools. Having now lived here for a while and encountered adult women like this, I do wonder if part of the problem is that this area has a lot of social competition and that the kids learn these behaviors from their parents and it's part of a broader trend of using relational aggression to socially position yourself. As someone who grew up far away in a more rural, less competitive, place, I was way out of my depth there. And still am! I find the way some people behave here shocking and probably would not have chosen to live here if I'd understood this better before making major education and career decisions.[/quote]

I didn’t grow up in DC, but I grew up in a wealthy suburb in the Midwest, and this is absolutely passed down from parents.  
I can definitely see how if you thought this was just TV, it would be shocking to see it for the first time in grown adults!![/quote]

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