The Long Campaign
Two friendships I lost, and what they taught me about patience and boundaries
Consistency looks simple on paper: show up, repeat the action, watch it compound. It looks different the moment the thing you are trying to be consistent for is a woman you love, and she needs something from you that does not match what you are offering.
Get it wrong long enough, and you do not just drift from a friendship. You lose her, and she walks away feeling rejected and betrayed by someone who was supposed to understand her. She becomes one more lonely woman veteran on a list that is already too long.
Isolation is the terrain we default to. It gets more comfortable the longer we stand in it, until slipping back there stops feeling like a decision at all. It starts to feel like rest.
Many of us are already used to this, because it is lonely at the top. Command comes easier to some of us than female friendship does. Leadership asks you to decide fast and keep the mission moving forward, even when someone on your team disagrees with you. Friendship asks you to slow down. It asks you to sit inside someone else’s uncertainty without trying to fix it. Leadership rewards being needed. Friendship asks you to let yourself need someone back out loud. You can lead a team, hold a room, run a program with a hundred moving parts, and none of that automatically makes you a good friend.
What does it take to be a good friend? Consider that friends, similar to a good business, are in it for the long campaign. When the pit stop from my last article ends, the race keeps going. Before my podcast reached one year and fifty-six episodes with no gaps, it had an earlier moment worth remembering. That moment shows what it takes to walk a good path.
Episode 22 landed the show in the top one percent globally. The audio was never perfect. Episode 7 had a mistake I didn’t catch until after I published it. Episode 15 ran ten minutes too long. What got the show there was showing up on Tuesdays. I don’t have a million downloads an episode. I’m a year in (and nowhere close), yet I keep recording anyway.
That story is easy to tell because it comes with a measurable win attached. Top one percent is measurable, and measurable feels like proof. But the campaign this chapter is really about does not come with a leaderboard. It is the one I have been running my whole life with the women I love, and it does not reward volume the way a podcast algorithm does.
It rewards something quieter: showing up in a form she can feel, in the pattern of this friendship that fits her natural operating pattern, not yours.
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to tell the difference between a friendship running on the pattern that fits it and one where you are the only woman still giving, and you will have a small, repeatable way to close that gap without needing a grand gesture to do it.
The Wilderness of Assuming Everyone's Consistency Looks the Same
I was young then, no kids yet, sitting across from a friend I had been looking forward to seeing for weeks. She had her daughter with her, and within five minutes that baby had her whole attention. She made faces at her and bounced her on her knee, up and down, until I lost my own sentence twice. Every few seconds brought another dropped toy, another reach for the diaper bag, another round of cooing I was apparently supposed to admire.
I had come to that table carrying something I had never said out loud to anyone. My now ex-husband had been unfaithful, and I needed a friend who could sit still long enough to hold that with me. I watched her attention bounce along with her knee and thought, what am I even doing here?
