In 2024, May We All Balance Our Girlies and Partners as Easily as Taylor Swift

Sophie Turner recently called 2023 “the year of the girlies,” noting in a post on Instagram that she expected 2024 to be much the same—and personally I need to believe she’s right. (To be clear, while I am very over “girl” trends, I’m by no means over girls themselves, especially when they’re in their plural form as “girlies.” Basically, I want people—except for Sandy Liang—to stop putting bows on things, but I still want women to hang out with each other and ideally with me as well.)

Turner, of course, counts no less a girl-squad authority than Taylor Swift among her girlies, which brings me to a subject I’ve been ruminating upon since Swift first stepped out with a young, unknown tight end named Travis Kelce, who plays for a team called…the Chiefs? Swift is good at a great many things, ranging from music to hair care to cat ownership, but I think her greatest achievement is one of the hardest things to pull off: She seems to have figured out how to hang with her girlies while also winning girlfriend points by simply bringing her friends to Chiefs games. Genius!

This method might not sound replicable if your partner doesn’t happen to lead an NFL team, but I maintain that in the battle to make friendship coexist with partnership—or what I like to call “the Carrie Bradshaw Paradox”—an unexpected pairing can be your greatest ally. I adore all my friends’ partners now, but for a long time, I had to enter their domains in order to get to know them…which makes sense, given that most straight guys don’t tend to hang at terrazzo-tile wine bars while surrounded by their girlfriends’ shrieking friends. (What can I say? My friends and I like to shriek.) I biked with one friend’s boyfriend, discovered a favorite podcast I had in common with another, and eventually learned that pretty much all my friends and their partners could be reliably drawn out with a night of Koreatown karaoke. Is Swift bringing Turner, assorted Haims and Hadids, and other friends to Chiefs games just the famous-pop-star equivalent of belting out “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in a $30-per-hour karaoke room? It just may be!

Turner is, of course, famously in her single era right now, so it’s possible that she’s not worrying about how to blend partners and besties. But if I may be so bold and parasocial as to compliment someone else’s friendship dynamic, I love the fact that she and Swift have hung out so much and gotten so close, even as Swift has been presumably busy with her relationship with Kelce (and the world’s fascination with it). There’s a special place in hell for girls who ditch their friends when a handsome, cleft-chin man comes along, and thankfully Swift seems to be extremely skilled at avoiding it.