This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - BAD FRIEND: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship with Tiffany Watt Smith | 332

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Maybe women aren’t bad at friendship — maybe we’ve just been handed a model that doesn’t actually work. One that expects perfection, constant connection, and a whole lot of emotional labor... without any room for evolution, conflict, or change. In this episode, we’re questioning that model and taking a deeper look at how friendship has changed — historically, culturally, and personally — with cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith. Together, we explore how women have been portrayed as bad friends (by the media and by society), and how we’ve quietly been redefining friendship on our own terms. We talk about why friendship dips are normal, why disagreements aren’t deal-breakers, and why being a “bad friend” might actually be a sign that you’re showing up in a real, honest, human way. Because the goal isn’t friendship that looks perfect from the outside. It’s friendship that can bend, stretch, shift, and still hold. This conversation is part history lesson, part gut check, and all about rebuilding our relationships on something real. Connect with Tiffany:  Book: https://celadonbooks.com/book/bad-friend-tiffany-watt-smith/ Substack: https://thefuturefeeling.substack.com/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/tiffanywattsmith/  X: https://x.com/drtiffwattsmith?lang=en  Related Podcast Episodes: Normalize It: Breaking The Silence & Shame That Shape Women’s Lives with Dr. Jessica Zucker | 303 133 / Making Friends As An Adult with Danielle McCombs The Small And The Mighty with Sharon McMahon | 247 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrills.ca. I am Nicole Kalil and you're listening to the This Is Women's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And if there's one thing that has always been and will always be part of that work, whether we acknowledged it or not, it's friendship. We've talked a little bit about friendship on the show before,

friends as soulmates, the challenges of trying to make new friends when you're an adult, and the types of friends that I believe we all need. We've covered some of the who and the how and the why when it comes to this incredibly important connection. But what we haven't done is zoom out and examine the concept of friendship itself. Like why is it that we expect our friendships to stay perfectly aligned through every major shift in our life, like all of our romantic relationships, career changes, having or not having kids, living in different parts of the world, when literally nothing else in

our lives ever does stay perfectly aligned. Why do we treat every single disagreement or season of distance as a red flag instead of a normal rhythm? Why is cutting someone off represented as maturity on social media while sticking it out sometimes gets labeled as having weak boundaries? We've ultimately created a culture where friendships are expected to deliver constant emotional return on investment, where we're told to ask ourselves if this friendship is serving you far more than asking ourselves, how am I showing up for this person? And where the normal

ebb and flow of human connection gets pathologized as toxic. We hear more about mean girls, cutthroat career women, and bridezillas than we ever do about what it feels like to navigate the quiet, complicated realities of friendship. The drift, the repair, and the choosing, again and again. Maybe, just maybe, women aren't as bad at friendship as the media's like to portray. Maybe we've just created or bought into a version of it that's not built to last. So today, we're going to look at friendship from a completely different angle,

historical, cultural, and evolutionary. Because the way we view friendship now, it hasn't always been this way. And maybe it's time to examine and rethink what we expect from each other. Our guest is Tiffany Watt-Smith, a cultural historian and the author of the book of human emotions and Schadenfreude. Her TED Talk, The History of Human Emotions, has been viewed more than four and a half

million times. She's a BBC New Generation thinker, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and was the director of the Center for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. And her newest book, Bad Friend, is hitting shelves and I cannot wait to talk about this concept. So Tiffany, thank you for being our guest and I would love to start by asking about the book and the title, Bad Friend. I mean, what are we talking about here? What do we need to know about what it is

or what it isn't to be a bad friend? So we're surrounded in our culture by so many idealized, and kind of extraordinary images of what female friendship might look like. And certainly, it can feel very hard to live up to some of those perfect images if you think about, I don't know, the foursome from Sex and the City or the workplace gal pals in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There's so many wonderful images of female friendship. And that's right, because female friendship is an extraordinary thing.

But there are, as you said in your introduction, so many ways in which friendship can go through different seasons, where friendship can feel like it's dropping out of connection, where we might worry that we are being or that we have a bad friend. And this is a phrase I've heard myself say, I've heard other people around me say, am I a bad friend, am I being a bad friend? So I was really interested in trying to unpick what does this phrase mean?

How do we learn what a bad friend might look like? What are the narratives and the images that have taught us what a bad friend might be? And I think it's really important that we understand those stories because they're part, I think, of we're living in this age of disconnection, of loneliness, of isolation, where it's harder than ever to make connections with each other. And I wonder if part of the reason for this is because we have a very narrow idea about what good friendship looks like and a very sort of elaborate idea about what bad friends might be. And so that was the basis of my wanting to really unpick this idea, what it meant to me as an individual and also what it had meant across time as well.

— So as you were talking, that speaks to what was going on in my brain, because I think we've got a lot of information. Like you said, we tend to elaborate a lot on what it is to be a bad friend. You know, we talk about toxic people and toxic friendships and toxic relationships ad nauseum. But the flip side of that would be, like, ideal or perfect friendship, and I don't know if that actually exists.

Like, maybe you have one friend over the course of your lifetime that's like that, you know, ideal relationship or whatever. But there's so much opportunity in the middle, in between those things, for all of us to be normal, human, imperfect people in relationship with each other. First, let me just ask your reaction to what I just said. Is that kind of on par with what you're saying, that we have a lot of information

about what it is to be toxic and this idea that there is these perfect relationships as opposed to a lot of gray area in the middle? Yeah, I think that's exactly it. So as a historian, one thing that I can tell you is that throughout history, our idea of friendship has changed quite significantly. And the big change that's occurred is to do with gender.

So for thousands of years, in fact, men were considered to be the great experts in friendship. They were the ones for whom, you for whom poetry was written about their friends, monuments were erected to great male friendships across time. Women were considered to be rather inferior and incapable of forming very close and sustained bonds. This idea began to change in the 18th century with new ideas about emotion and sympathy, which was the old word for empathy.

And by the 19th century, we start getting this idea that women are actually better at friendship than men are. And this is completely transformed from earlier centuries. And the idea that women were better at friendship came from this notion that they were more inherently emotional, better at empathy, that they were kind of somehow hardwired to always care for other people

and always put other people's needs first. So it was kind of connected with this idea of the woman as the angel of the house, you know, who is sort of endlessly putting everyone else's needs before her own. And so having a group of female friends became a very important signifier of being a kind of successful, living a successful female life. You know, that's how by the end of the 19th century, that was pretty well established.

There had been a very dramatic reversal of earlier periods in time. Now in the 20th century, which is the century, I think, that most clearly shapes the narratives of friendship we're living in today, people began to really idealize female friendship. And obviously, as women experienced all kinds of new freedoms, so their relationships with each other

became much more visible. So they were there in Hollywood movies and on fashion shows and in advertising. And then as the century went on, they were discussed in self-help books and magazine columns and, and in popular fiction, and then of course, on TV and in the news and so on. So, so female friendship becomes a lot more visible. And as it becomes a lot more visible, it also becomes much more open to vigilance and patrol, patrolling. So people start giving all kinds of advice about the kind of dangerous bad friends

that you might meet. So for example in the 1930s as women were joining the workforce in much larger numbers and they were working in large offices that considered themselves to be very exciting places where people from all over America would end up working in these offices. And there was a lot of sort of self-help literature written for young women, particularly at that time, about how they should behave in these offices. And of course there was lots of advice about what you should look like

and how you should be deferential to your male boss and so on. But there was a lot of information about how you should relate to other women in the workplace. And the key thing was that you should not under any circumstances make friends with those, with those women. So you should be polite and you should be charming and you should be friendly, but you should not make any kind of intimate friend of anyone in the office.

Now, the book I'm particularly thinking about was written by a woman called Elizabeth McGibbon in 1936 and it was published, it was on the New York Times bestseller list the same year as the much better known, now Dale Carnegie's, How to Win Friends and Influence People also hit the bestseller list. And of course, there's only anyone who's read Carnegie's book knows that that advice is

is diametrically different. So his book was aimed at mostly male salesmen. And he says, well, you know, it's really important to foster friendships and foster connections. And he understands that it's part of what we nowadays would call social capital. It's very important to have these kinds of connections and networks. Whereas women that year were being advised to absolutely don't make close friends because you know there's a risk that you might get drawn into gossip, there's a risk you might get drawn into cliques, you might spill your heart to a woman one week, and then the next week discover that you hate each other and she gives away all of your secrets.

So the kind of version of female friendship that was being portrayed, that it was a very dangerous place where women kind of lacked all discernment and were endlessly making terrible choices about the women they might be friends with. Men were being advised, well, you know, it's very important to make friends and it's very useful for your business. So here in that little example, there's a clear sort of sense that, yes, there were these terrible, dangerous female friendships

that become part of popular culture in the 20th century. And then there is some version, you know, that sort of floats above those terrible, these terrible dangerous friendships of some kind of perfect friendship that's always being kind of implied and invoked, you know, but no one ever seems to quite achieve it. So I think that repeats itself through the 20th century. We get a lot of media images about that, that kind of warn us, as you were saying, about these kind of terrible dangers of friendship, and then imply a kind of, some kind of friendship,

which is free from all friction, risk, tension, even change. So that the ideal friendship is this kind of lifelong best friendship where, you know, where those friends are always there for each other and are always, you know, completely supportive and empathetic and always putting each other first in that, in that manner of that Victorian ideal. And if they're not quite achieving that, then they've kind of fallen off the pedestal into this terrible morass of toxic, as you say, cliquey, unreliable, dangerous friends. Yeah, it's sort of like the Prince Charming version of friendship, right? Like we've romanticized it to this idea that someone's gonna say and do all of the right things all the time. And if they don't, they must not love you enough,

they must not care enough, and therefore should be cut out of your life. I mean, I think that's incredibly dangerous, and I get the impression that you do too, because, you know, a friendship is a human relationship, and as humans, you know, a friendship is a human relationship, and as humans, you know, of course our lives change so much across time, and as individuals are encountering different kinds of things in our lives, whether that's to do with work, or raising families, or looking after elders, or living in different parts of the world, you know, and we have to expect an amount of drift and change

and sometimes even friction in our friendships. And to sort of not be able to manage that, I think, is very problematic. A hundred percent. And I found the history very interesting, and in some cases, shocking, like this idea that for many, many, many centuries that men were touted as being better friends. It's so foreign to what I think we hear today, but I also think I've seen a lot more messaging, at least in the last couple of decades, of this more women as mean girls can't totally be trusted, ultra competitive in the career space.

It's, I think, sometimes a little bit hard to navigate. So let's talk about some of these things that may be being labeled as bad as opposed to just part of the reality in which we live in, like friendship dips or times and spaces where, you know, we're not totally connected. We both said a handful of reasons why that might be. Um, living in different places, having or not having kids, romantic relationships, career, whatever,

is sort of getting in the way. This idea that distance in a relationship is somehow telling you how valuable the relationship is or isn't. So let me start there. What's a different way to look at it besides it being toxic or a sign that this person doesn't care or that the friendship should be over? So one of the ideas that I found really useful that I came across when I was writing the book was by, it was two psychotherapists called Susie Orbach and Louise Eichenbaum, and they were writing in the 80s, 1980s. They were feminists and they'd worked, you know, they'd been part of the Women's Liberation Movement, and they'd set up a psychotherapy practice together in London. And they were really interested in the idea, they called it bonding without cloning.

And what they meant by this was they believed that women were kind of socially primed to always put their own desires and experiences in line with other peoples. And one of the things that happens when we do that is when we meet other women, when we become friends with other women, there is, they argued, there is this kind of merging that takes place where we kind of feel as if we have, we're part of the kind of almost the same being, you know, and there's something kind of wonderful when we have that experience, we meet someone and we really,

we feel like, you know, you talked about, you've done an episode on friends as soulmates, you know, we do get that some very powerful feeling that we somehow share some history, a lot of experiences, there's something about us that feels almost the same. And that, they argued, was very alluring for women in particular because women are socialised to really value the sensation of merging with someone else and aligning themselves to their desires and experiences. So, and they said, well, you know, this is all good and it's all, and it's very exciting when that happens because we have, it can create this kind of wonderful sensation of empathy and compassion for each other.

But one of the problems that is that when we eventually have to separate, when we have experiences that don't completely align, when our lives go in different directions, then it can be very traumatizing actually to have those separations and to go in different ways. So the reason why I wrote this book Bad Friend was because was out of a very sort of traumatic friendship experience I had in my late 20s. And I write about it quite a lot in the book. It was with a woman who is my best friend. She's she was called Sophia. And we had really seen ourselves as soulmates. We had been in many ways inseparable. We had loved

when people had thought we were sisters. And, you know, had thought we were sisters, or, you know, so that, and we had really enjoyed feeling like we were always completely on the same track. But then actually, our lives did start to go in different ways. And it sounds kind of, you know, when I look back, it's sort of heartbreakingly familiar, but also kind of seems so sort of superficial, really, you know. One of the things was that we had very different kinds of careers. She was working in the corporate world and I was making quite a lot of money. I was running around in low-paid arts jobs. She got married and had a baby. I was still with a string of unsuitable boy know, living in a flat with moldy cheese and a fridge. You know, she was going on very fancy skiing holidays. The idea of going on holiday

seemed to, you know, belong to a different universe, you know. So our sort of lives were going in different directions and it was very hard somehow for us to connect across those gaps. And it shouldn't have been and it's a shame that it was, but I think that was part of that difficulty of separation, that difficulty of saying, okay, actually, we are different people. We do have slightly different values at certain times, and we certainly have very different kinds of experiences. And it took a long time, and I talk about this in the book, it took a long time for us to kind of come back together as friends and to be able to be friends on, you know,

different kinds of terms. You know, we no longer expect each other to be everything to each other. We no longer expect the other person to always kind of completely get what we feel or have experienced the same thing or be on the same page at all times. We have become very different kinds of people, but it took that experience that I described, you know, bonding without cloning, it took me learning how to not expect to clone, but just learn how to bond across difference, learn how to enjoy all the things in her life

that were very different to my own and to be able to create the space to say, well, look, I don't really know what that's like, but why don't you tell me? This is part of growing up, I think, but it's also, for me, it was very sort of liberating to understand that that was actually a very common phenomenon amongst female friends for these very particular social reasons which are to do with how women are brought up and the expectations that we have that we will form these very intense and close units. And then kind of being left at sea when we have to separate and we have to

manage the difference between us. So two things popped into my head first. Yeah, as you were talking about the cloning part, I had like actual visceral response of when I was younger thinking my friends and I, we had to like the same things. I see this with my 11 year old. She's like, this person's my friend because we both like the same color and we both play the same video game. And it's like this idea that we're supposed to like and want the same things is what makes friendship as opposed to, because that's not sustainable, nobody will ever like and want the same things

as another person for the rest of their lives, as opposed to defining friendship as, is this somebody I trust? Is this somebody I feel safe with? Is this somebody I have fun with, regardless of whether or not we like the same things or see the world in the same way. Any reactions to that? One of the great pieces of advice I had writing this book was actually from my 94-year-old mother-in-law.

And she said, she is someone actually who does have a friend, a lifelong friendship. I think she met her very close friend, I think when they were, if I'm right, I think they were 11 at boarding school in Ireland. And she, I asked her, because you know, of course, why wouldn't you, you know, what did she think the secret of this lifelong friendship was? And she said, well, you know, I think you ask yourself, what does she need? And then you try and do it. And I thought that was lovely, that you're sort of just trying to help each other out. It's not really to do with, as you say,

to do with liking the same thing. And I recognize that, I've got an 11 year old daughter and I can see the complexities of their friendship groups. And it is often to do with identifying yourself about what are the kinds of things you like, you know, what is your taste, what, you know, what do you enjoy and so on. But ultimately, I think what it comes down to is your willingness to want to do something to help that person, I think. The other thought that kind of keeps popping in my mind is what I believe to be a bit of an obsession that we have with long-term

relationships. This idea that it has to last forever in order for it to be real or valuable, as opposed to some people play an integral and important and valuable and loving role in our lives for certain periods of time, but may not be your friend for the long haul. I think back, I have a few friendships that I'm so grateful for that person at that time in my life, but we haven't talked in years. There's no bad blood. I'm not questioning whether they're a bad friend or if I'm a bad friend. There wasn't a breakup.

It just, we evolved into different places in our lives. So I guess my question is, where do we make space for short-term friendships or friendships for a purpose at a period of time? And is that any more or less valuable? Yeah, so this is a great question and it's definitely something that has plagued me at certain times too. Was I a bad friend because I had friends who I was very close to for a short period of time but

then hadn't spoken to, as you say, for years? And then you think, gosh, is that some sort of indictment of my ability to have the kind of courage that friendship takes or something, or the stamina that friendship takes, something like that. I mean, I think there's a few different things to say here. I mean, one of them is that our anxiety about long-term and short-term friendships, that's been around for almost 2000 years. The ancient Greek philosophers who first started thinking and writing about male friendship, they wrote about the importance of a lifelong bond.

That was the pinnacle of friendship. And that was the perfect friendship. And the other kinds of friendships they regarded as inferior, and those were the kind of friendship that would be struck up because you had a kind of shared interest for a few months, and you both went to the same boxing club, or also were friendships that were struck up out of mutual need.

So you were both working together and you were helping each other out and so on. But once those conditions changed, you no longer needed each other, so the friendship kind of fizzled out. So they created this very clear hierarchy between these ordinary kinds of friendships and then this kind of perfect lifelong friendship. And to carry on this thing about gender, it meant they thought men were capable

of these perfect lifelong friendships, whereas women were only ever capable of these more pragmatic, transient sort of friendships. So it's kind of built into the into the cultural DNA of how we think about friendship to sort of value those transient friendships less highly and to kind of see them as an inferior breed of friendship. But, and this idea was reinforced then in the 1950s and 60s, particularly by sociologists working in America, they were looking at a world where people were much more transient, where people were moving for work a lot more, and where friendship groups would be struck up and then disbanded fairly quickly.

So there was a particular strain of thinking about women's friendship at this time, which was to do with this idea that women were creating these very superficial bonds. They had sort of forgotten how to have proper lifelong friendships because they were endlessly moving around the country, usually with their husbands who were moving for work. This was the image that was being presented. And so these women were kind of joining all of the PTAs and the clubs and

so on, and they were making these kind of friendships, but then they were dropping them really quickly and then moving on to the next place and doing it all over again. And that was seen, those friendships were, you know, in some of the literature, those relationships aren't even called friendships, they're called, you know, acquaintanceships. You know, there's this real sense that that's not a proper friendship. So, yeah, so part of what I was really interested in writing this book is trying to reclaim all kinds of previously thought of as inadequate forms of friendship, you know, I think it's really important in an age where we are struggling with the idea

of a loneliness epidemic in an age where we are wondering what the future of friendship might look like, that we can expand our idea of friendship, you know, that we can expand it to include a much more messy and capacious notion of what friendship might be and that friendships which are transient, friendships we might strike up with strangers even over a few hours even, friendships that we might strike up online with people whose real identities we might not even know, all of those have their place in allowing us

to form connections with other people around us. 100%. Okay, my last question is, I had never really thought about friendship from a historical standpoint before starting to prep this episode. And when I think about women as friends in the past, what comes to mind for me is more like community,

even tribal, like women living together, being together, supporting each other through childbirth and all the things. One of the things I think you talk about is this sort of re-rise of older women choosing to live together and reviving a forgotten model of friendship. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you're seeing there? Yeah, so, yeah, one of the things I enjoyed most researching was this question of older women choosing to live together

in self-governing, self-defined communities, co-housing communities, I think they're officially called. So these are communities that, the people I interviewed were living in a quite a wide range of different setups. So some were kind of informally living together as housemates, like, you know, the Golden Girls, and some of them were living in quite formal large communities of you know 25 or so women, you know with very clear rules and you know agreements about all kinds of things. But one of the things I found very inspiring about that model was these were people who were trying to leverage their friendships to make sure they were able to care for each other in their older age,

support one another, that they were able also to provide companionship at a time of life when it's very easy to slip into isolation and loneliness, and that they, on the whole, were finding these experiences to be extremely successful. One of the things that I kind of went into those meetings, you know, whether I was visiting those communities in person or meeting them over Zoom, one of the things that I always kind of thought, God, these people are, you know, they're kind of miraculous, you know, they're able to live, you know, with, you know, I wasn't sure whether I could really live with my friends again, you know, I wasn't completely, you know, I would hear people talk about this idea that, you know, we'd all move in together and I think, I don't know, you know, would I just, would you just all annoy the hell out of each other, you know, would we be, you know, really frustrated

with each other and so on. And, and so I was always rather in awe of these women who were able to live together. And one of the things I came away from those conversations understanding was that, of course they have their ups and downs and of course they have fractious moments and conflicts and irritations. And they're not always brilliant at resolving them. And they're not always totally honest with each other

and clear about their feelings and so on. You know, and sometimes they do avoid each other and all of the rest of it. And but the thing that really mattered was that they kept trying. You know, they kept trying to be friends with each other. They kept, as you said in your lovely introduction, they kept choosing each other. And I thought that was very inspiring and a very different kind of model of friendship. You know, when I was young, I thought friendship really was about, you know, falling in love, you know, I thought it was like some sort of

transcendent bolt from the blue, it was sort of something that happened to you, and then you fell into it. And then that was kind of it. And of course, as we all know, and as certainly these older women definitely knew, friendship is really about work and it's about choosing each other and knowing that, you know, you're going to be there for each other. Yeah. Okay. If you want to learn more about friendship, you can grab the book. Again, it's called Bad Friend. And Tiffany also has a sub stack called The Future Feeling. We'll put the link to that and it's called Bad Friend. And Tiffany also has a sub stack called The Future Feeling. We'll put the link to that and every other way

to find and follow Tiffany in show notes. Tiffany, thank you for taking us down a little bit of a historical exploration and more importantly, a personal exploration about what friendship is and isn't and what it can be. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Okay, so friend, here's what I'm thinking. Is that friendship isn't and what it can be. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Okay, so, friend, here's what I'm thinking.

It's that friendship isn't failing us as women, but our expectations might be. We've been handed a version of friendship that's supposed to be effortless, always aligned and endlessly fulfilling, which sounds great until you remember that we're human. All of us. Messy, evolving, imperfect humans.

So friendship dips are normal. Disagreements aren't deal-breakers, quite possibly the opposite. And walking through hard seasons together, that's not weak boundaries, that's real relationship. What if being a bad friend sometimes means just being a real one? Honest, flawed, inconsistent, but still showing up in whatever way you can. Because maybe the goal isn't to have friendships that look perfect from the outside. It's to have ones that can weather the inside. Ones built to bend, not break. Ones built to last. And ones that can still be honored even when they don't. That. Redefining friendship on our own terms, with grace, with more history and more humanity?

Well, all of that is woman's work.