Who's invited

I overheard some friends of mine talking about a difficulty that their twelve-year-old daughters were having with each other. It was about who was invited to whose bat mitzvah. Not only that, it was about who knew who was invited to whose bat mitzvah, and what each of them thought it meant that certain people were invited, and what the people who knew who was invited were going to do with that information, and so on. I had to laugh, because there is nothing like that at our house at all. My kids just do things with their friends. They are quite emotionally intelligent (in my opinion), but they do not spend time thinking about the possible implications or alternative interpretations of their social actions. They invite people or they don’t invite people, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

I told Jordan what I had overheard my friends talking about and he cracked up. He said he never thinks about anything like that. “It’s so stupid,” he said, not in a mean way, more of a “why do people drive themselves crazy for no reason” kind of way. I said that I think this kind of thinking is more common among girls, not that boys can’t also do it (I know several who are masters), but it does seem to be more of a girl style in many cases.

Jordan: Yes. The girls. They are so weird about things like this. If you want to be friends with a girl you have to do nothing wrong for like a week.
Rachel: What do you mean, do nothing wrong?
Aaron: Like finish your math homework?
Jordan: No, not like that. Like one of my friends likes to do these fancy moves like slide down a handrail, but more often he falls off backwards, and we say “Very smooth, Billy.”* Girls don’t want you to do anything wrong like that. Although strangely enough that guy is friends with lots of girls.

I think Jordan’s point was that girls have social requirements, in which actions are (pointlessly, in his opinion) interpreted in terms of what they mean for the relationship.

Having been a girl myself, I totally get this. I remember in middle school and high school, my friends and I obsessed over what someone else’s behavior said about our friendship/romance/enmity/whatever. When we felt bold we even quizzed boys about what it meant when they said that thing, or declined to say a thing. The boys were always maddeningly enigmatic – or at least that’s how I saw them at the time. Now I think they just literally had no idea what we were talking about.

* Billy is not a person; he is their “everyman.”