I woke up this morning to notifications from our Bristol Girl slack channel, where planning for that community happens behind the scenes. They were a flurry of ‘home now’ messages, with the last one saying: “Back home too x really great night gals”, finished with a heart emoji and time-stamped for 1.18am. On the Brighton Girl slack channel, there was an ongoing conversation about felching – a somewhat private joke that keeps finding its way back into conversation.

The food and drinks channel was full of loving messages to our editor, who had just shared that she’s caught covid and that I’d be in charge for a while. And the books channel was full of recommendations for holiday books, and the beginnings of a discussion about why The Salt Path is such a good book to escape to.

Yesterday, I spoke to a broadcast journalist about the story of the City Girl Network, how the pandemic has impacted us, and why I think it’s harder to make friends as an adult than when you’re in school. She began our conversation by sharing that she’d met her housemates through London Girl and that the online community made her feel less alone during the pandemic, having only moved to London in March 2020.

I decided to write this particular thought piece in aide of International Friendship Day, taking place on Friday 30th July. Having spent the latter half of my twenties building a friendship network, it’s a subject that I’ve accidentally built my whole career on.

The creation of the City Girl Network is a fairly well-known story. It started with a girl looking out to sea, with me wondering whether she was as lost and lonely as I was. My solution was to create a magazine called Brighton Girl, as having been a recent journalism graduate, it felt like the easiest way to find my community. But the story goes that the magazine didn’t pull in the community I searched for, it was the meet-up that I hosted to promote the magazine and overtly profile my readership. A meet-up that taught me that the currency I was looking for was friendship, not content.

Brighton Girl evolved into the City Girl Network in 2016, shortly after the EU referendum in the UK, and it has kept evolving during a time of political, social, and economic uncertainty – Brexit, Trump, a geographical shift in the two-party British political system, Windrush, the BLM movement, Me Too, and, of course, the global pandemic. With each news story that leaves an anxious knot in our stomachs, the City Girl Network sees a flurry of new members signing up. We doubled our membership in 2020.

It’s only really now that I sit here writing from a bird’s eye view that I realise the integral importance that the promise of friendship has to one feeling less alone.

Growing up, I saw friendship as a hierarchal structure: you have a best friend, close friends, a group of friends, and acquaintances. Being promoted as someone’s ‘best friend’ was the ultimate goal, being demoted to ‘acquaintance’ status was like being fired from a job.

In my late teens and early twenties, my approach to friendship was very much ‘all or nothing’ – I had a large group of close friends, with an interchangeable number of best friends and everyone else was acquaintances. When the graduate years arrived, my conversations about friendships ended with the consensus that “we only need a handful of friends”. That point arises time and time again in podcasts, interviews, and magazine articles.

But if that’s what makes people happy, why is the City Girl Network growing so fast?

What I’ve learned in the last five years is that friendship is fluid. It’s the moments of connection and allyship between two or more people. You can see it on the anonymous threads in our Facebook Groups when someone’s facing a relationship breakdown and needs advice. The people who respond to a call out for a place to stay when they have nowhere else to go. And the hands that I’ve held at a police station when I’ve helped them to report sexual or domestic violence.

Or the girls that I’ve bumped into on the promenade, who all met at a Brighton Girl drinks night and are heading out for ice cream. The baby showers, hen parties, and weddings bringing together people I haven’t seen or spoken to in years but still have a thousand things to say. And all 248 volunteers in our slack channel, giving advice on each other’s housemate struggles, supporting each other when their mental health is at a low point, as well as the hilarious discussions around bad dates, lockdown haircuts, and, of course, felching.

The power of friendship doesn’t lie in the label that you give to that person. It lies in the comment threads, the messages, the phone calls, the laughs, the walks, the dancing, the crying, and the deep conversations – all the little moments when you become a friend.

Written by Pippa Moyle, Founder of the City Girl Network

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