There’s an old phrase that goes “To have a friend and be a friend is what makes life worthwhile”, one so eternally simplistic and relevant that it’s transcended a sense of ownership, so true is its message. Even still, there’s something magical about female friendships. As I sat stuffing my face with syrup-saturated pancakes on my first GirlCrew “date”, I realised that not only was I thoroughly entertained discussing Australian politics and the best clubs in Dublin, but I had suddenly become pensive and emotional about the importance of female friendship. This was only cemented when, the next evening at a group date, we all laughed together at the waiter who would wink at me every time he passed by. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know each other. What mattered was that unique sense of connection between women. It was nice to not have any strings attached to our meeting, it was nice to just have fun and learn about these new people, however fleeting these encounters may be. My original aim in using GirlCrew, a service for making female friendships, was to discover why people – women, specifically – use the internet to make friends, as well as how successful these connections are. But over the course of my dates, I quickly and unexpectedly detached myself from that.
GirlCrew was set up by Waterford woman Elva Carri, who, upon coming to Dublin, realised that a lot of her friends were either having kids or working more. She wanted to go out dancing and realised that you can read a book alone, go for coffee alone, do lots of things alone, but going clubbing is not one of them. Herein lies the premise of GirlCrew. Everyone needs friends, someone to stop you texting that fuckboy, encourage you to text the fuckboy, discuss personal highs and lows with or just spot you a bobby pin in an emergency, but not everyone finds it easy to make them. So she set up the website, which in theory could be compared to Tinder for making friends. It differs in that, instead of an app, it is a website which gives you options of which city you would like to join (there are over 50 to choose from, ranging from Auckland to Orlando, from Dublin to Singapore) and this links you to a Facebook page. It is on this Facebook page that you can introduce yourself, scroll through different events and set up your own. From there, you simply begin commenting on other people’s posts saying that you’d like to meet up and other people will comment on yours. Easy, right?
I was considerably nervous to begin with. I debated for a few days over how best to present myself, whether my Facebook page was inviting enough and wondering how people would react to me – typical worries when social media and the perception it can induce is part of your upbringing. My worries, it turns out, were completely unfounded. Within a day I had multiple likes and comments and had arranged three dates for the following few days. The variety of the Dublin GirlCrew page is a testament to the city’s massively diverse population in terms of race, nationality and even gender identity. There is, in fact, over 3,000 members and, given the online platform of the service, you could presume that all 3,000 of those women would be around the same college-going age. As someone who had always maintained that age is just a number, I was glad that there were women of all ages and that they had no qualms about messaging me, regardless of the fact that I am very obviously a 19 year-old student. No one seemed to mind either when they learned I was writing a piece on the service.
Everyone needs friends, someone to stop you texting that fuckboy, encourage you to text the fuckboy, discuss personal highs and lows with or just spot you a bobby pin in an emergency, but not everyone finds it easy to make them.
The women’s reasons for being on the site were also heartwarming. Growing up with the onset of online dating and the general openness of the internet, I’ve always been dubious about the types of people who use the internet for social reasons, such as with Tinder. While I have absolutely nothing against online dating, I was just worried about the type of people it attracted – we’ve all gotten that lecture from a parent about paedophiles and rapists posing as 13 year-olds. With GirlCrew, however, you can clearly see from the start people’s reasons for joining. Many women had recently moved to Ireland and so had very few social networks. Others had recently moved back home to Ireland after living abroad for a couple of years and came back to a very different social scene than they remembered, one with lots of babies and weddings which they hadn’t necessarily endeavoured to make a priority in their own lives. For other women, they simply hadn’t gone through life at the same pace as their friends and so needed something like GirlCrew for a simple coffee or dinner and drinks that didn’t involve the requirement of a babysitter or copious amounts of prior planning. A lot of the women I “dated” actually didn’t even have a definitive idea in their own mind about why they were a part of the site. For Fiona, it was because a friend had recommended it, and for Casey, it was an article on Lovin’ Dublin that had encouraged her to join. So for a lot of women, it’s another reason to get out there and meet some great, potentially lifelong friends. Who’s going to turn that down?
Before we go any further, let’s just do away with society’s stupidly fixed romantic associations and call them dates. I am unsure what else to call them because they technically do fit the Google definition of a “social or romantic engagement or appointment”, and it’s hardly just a meeting between two old friends.
I had arranged my first date with Hanna Gennerud, a seemingly very friendly and open young woman who was quick to return my attempts to organise a coffee and was just as keen on pancakes as I am. We agreed to meet on a Monday at 2pm, and as I sent the last message of “See you then”, I found myself oddly impressed with how easy and efficient the system is. I woke up on the morning feeling nervous and intimidated by the situation that I had found myself in. I was unusually agitated by the inability of my hair to comply and my outfit to look “right”. I had gone from being very confident in my ability to have an enjoyable experience and take a break from essay writing for a few hours of nice company, to panicking that she would think I was boring and leave after 15 minutes. I wanted her to like me. There is something considerably more daunting about meeting a girl platonically rather than romantically, a shift which reduced your chances of connection from sex appeal to how interesting and unique you are. It doesn’t help that there are few representations of true female friendship in the media and popular culture, excepting perhaps Thelma and Louise, Broad City and some more recent additions. I figured I had nothing to lose. Even if the date went horribly, at least I would be getting some good pancakes. I feel as though possible negative experiences are a huge deterrent for a lot of women, but I figured you have to put yourself out there in order to potentially get anything back. Plus, what’s the worst that can really happen? You hate it and tell the girls that you urgently need to leave for whatever reason. Nobody is going to judge you for it, we’re all busy, cosmopolitan ladies here.
Hanna was a lovely looking young woman: classy, warm and, it turns out, my exact age. We had gotten off to a good start. I was comfortable. From then on the conversation flowed smoothly, only punctuated by bathroom breaks and to marvel at an incredibly odd man who stopped beside us to comb out his helmet hair in the window behind us. Herein lies the beauty of the site: it creates a sense of spontaneity for even the most non-spontaneous person, such as myself. In contrast, my date for the following day was a group date. One of GirlCrew’s strengths is that, due to operating on Facebook pages, group dates are easily set up as different people can comment on the same post if they’re interested. Before you know it you have a group chat that’s making plans for the following day – #squad. We started off in Accents, a fabulous little cafe that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a trendy millennial’s sitting room while drinking considerably better hot chocolate than your average coffee shop’s. It provided the perfect backdrop for my date with three new girls and Hanna. I had already gotten into the rhythm of the process of how GirlCrew worked and was keen to discover something fascinating about each one, considering my first date had gone so successfully.
All three of the girls were Irish but had been brought up in very different backgrounds, and not one of them had had completely the same life experiences as me, so there was lots to talk about. There were some quite obviously silent moments when we paused to contemplate further conversational topics, but we got over them fairly quickly, and by the time we went for cocktails I was having a blast. What was notable from the start was that everyone was making a conscious effort to bring something fun to the table, a conscious decision that separated this meeting from more random encounters. Even if it was because no one wanted to seem like the boring one, it proves GirlCrew’s vision of encouraging genuine connection in a digital age that privileges speed and convenience.
There was an interesting girl-on-girl dynamic from the start. It was interesting to see how the women were reacting to the scenario and to see how they were presenting themselves. Everyone had gone to a different university and had different relationships with boys. Before the night had even properly begun, there were invites to a dinner that Saturday, so the whole idea of social networking being able to enable friendship in the real world really comes into play. One girl, Casey, had even been to a “newbie night” a few weeks ago where they had met up in Xico, drank, had some nice food and played human bingo. Although, some may say that human bingo isn’t as good as playing at swankybingo.com for a cash prize. I think there are a lot of people who may prefer online bingo to human bingo, but it can be just as fun, therefore here are some of the best bingo sites if people would like more variety of the games they are playing. It does, however, show how unique these kinds of dates are because the women were much more relaxed than I’ve ever been on a romantic date with someone.
I was keen to understand whether or not women were using the site for anything other than advice and a chance to get to simply befriend new women. The overwhelming consensus from everyone I dated was that other meetup sites in Dublin, which involved all sexes, had a tendency to lean more towards a dating line of progression as opposed to the desired friendship. All of the women I met talked about how they simply wanted to have some girlfriends for support and coffee dates, and none of them were looking for hook ups or any sort of dating scenario. Hanna asserted how female friendship can “boost your self-esteem and pick you up from low moments in a way that male friends simply cannot do”. No matter how hard they try, there are always going to be things that, as a girl, you couldn’t say to a boy, at least not without extensive time to warm them up. You can’t just launch into an anecdote about the time you almost passed out from the pain of menstrual cramps or cry together in front of a romantic comedy with four tubs of Ben and Jerry’s after a particularly heart wrenching breakup. It’s during these moments that you need the solace of a female friend.
No matter how hard they try, there are always going to be things that, as a girl, you couldn’t say to a boy, at least not without extensive time to warm them up.
Nobody that I spoke to had had negative experiences using the site. There are people that you’re just not going to gel with long term, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy a nice museum date together. In speaking of past dates, yet another tenet of female connection made itself known in how each of the women complimented, praised and spoke with kindness about all the past GirlCrew dates, even those that didn’t go anywhere. One young woman on our group date, named Fadwa Norris Lumarine, was thrilled that after going on a night out and encountering the issue of an over-25s club, the women, instead of abandoning her and wishing her well on her journey home, all left together and went to another club. It’s this beautiful sense of togetherness that women have that makes the site so good: no woman is left behind and everyone makes an attempt to include each other.
Life has the potential to be a lonely place. My mother is constantly reminding me of the importance of treating your friends right because if you don’t, sooner or later you’ll be left with none and suddenly you don’t have any more prospects of making new ones. In school, there may be drama and there may be fighting but it’s also the period during which you’ll have the most opportunity to befriend someone, to make a connection, be it genuine or not. Yes, you may be pushed together by circumstance, but because you’re spending 40 hours a week with these kids, you’re bound to find something to keep your friendship alive. You can bond over essays and awful teachers and the complex predicaments of growing up. When you get into college or the workplace, it is very easy to suddenly find yourself isolated. Never mind the competitiveness of a college environment, friendships can simply become secondary to deadlines and career progression. No matter how hard you strive to be independent, there will always come a time when, for some reason or another, you need companionship.
GirlCrew allowed me to meet different types of girls in a way that suited me, that didn’t involve any form of sport or forced interaction. It’s very easy to think that the whole world revolves around the college you go to, and that if you haven’t mingled as well as you had hoped within college, you are doomed to be a friendless outcast. You forget that there may be so many other people who feel exactly the same way as you do, and GirlCrew seems to be one of the best mechanisms for connecting all these discombobulated, social people out there in the world.
