What Makes a Good Female Friendship, and Why Good-Hearted Women Stay in the Wrong Ones

What Makes a Good Female Friendship

I was asked to write an article about friendship by someone near and dear to me, a woman who seeks to grow as a human being and as the best version of herself she can be.  Our focus is on the empowerment of good-hearted women, those are the women who always seek first to look after others. They usually choose what’s best for someone else before considering their own needs.  They seek to improve the world for everyone around them. And while those are the focus of my coaching, the elements of this article are as much for a man seeking healthy friendships as for a woman seeking the same. 

That having been said…

A good and healthy friendship is one of the most powerful forces in a woman’s life. When it’s healthy, it feels like oxygen: steady, nourishing, and safe.  When it’s not, it becomes something far more complicated - a place where loyalty becomes self-sacrifice, compassion becomes over-functioning, and history becomes a leash.

It is most likely obvious to you the pain of what an unhealthy relationship can provide, because, like me, you likely have experienced one or more yourself.  If you haven’t, feel very fortunate; if you have, this article will hopefully help you avoid another.

A good and healthy friendship is not defined by longevity, convenience, or shared trauma.  It’s defined by alignment - emotional, relational, and energetic.  The elements below help define a healthy friendship that is fulfilling to both parties.

Accountability 

You or I are not perfect; we are going to screw up, and so is a friend.  How that is repaired is extremely important.  A good friend holds herself accountable for her impact.  She doesn’t weaponize her wounds, deflect responsibility, or make you pay for her unhealed pain.  Each of you can say, “I hear you,” without collapsing or retaliating.  There is no emotional blackmail that might sound like, “Well, since you…” or “I thought you were going to…”  There is a sense of joint compassion and understanding that neither of you is perfect.  Authenticity is always paramount, and we must allow ourselves to realize and be true to ourselves when we see that it isn’t.

Partnership 

A healthy friendship feels like a partnership, not parenting.  Both women contribute to the emotional landscape.  Both women initiate, repair, support, and show up.  There is reciprocity, and there isn’t silent scorekeeping.

Awareness

We must remember our imperfection.  A good friend isn’t always self-aware enough to notice when she’s projecting, withdrawing, or overstepping, but she is open to receiving that notice from us – at least from the point of having an authentic discussion.  She doesn’t expect you to manage her emotions or decode her silence. She brings clarity, not confusion.  And we must do the same.

Communication 

Healthy female friendships communicate directly, kindly, and consistently. They don’t rely on passive-aggressive hints, guilt, or emotional pressure. They talk to each other, not about each other.  In today’s world, we all have lives, and it’s extremely common that we don’t share pain in our lives.  But if our friendship is important and healthy, we must communicate a cause for our silence.  A simple text of, “I’ve been so busy, I’ve not been able to make time to speak with you.  You’re important to me, and when things have settled down, I will reach back out.  I just wanted you to know.”

A text like that is invaluable in an important, healthy friendship you might have.  We must remember that a good and healthy friendship is very much like a marriage.  If we don’t communicate, our partner may feel they are no longer important to us.  Friendships require similar communication.  Additionally, remembering that neither partner is perfect and our friend may be going through a difficult time and feeling non-communicative, which is why we need to reach out with the simple, “Thinking about you, hope you are okay.”

A wonderful friendship is a gift to both parties, so we need to be aware that we can both give and receive it.

Honesty 

Honesty in friendship is not brutality; it’s benevolence.  It’s the ability to tell the truth with tenderness.  It’s safe to say, “I love you, and I need something different,” without fearing abandonment, and be willing to accept their inability to provide what we may feel we need.  A healthy friendship understands that they may only be available for dire needs and not for everyday conversation; we must not take this as rejection but support their need – even if it is radio silence… and we need to express the same.

Emotional Safety 

This is the heart of it.  A good female friendship is a place where a woman can exhale.  Where she can be strong and soft, brilliant and broken and without being punished for either.  It may sound corny, but emotional safety is the soil where trust grows.

When these pillars are present, friendship becomes a place of growth, not depletion.

Why Good-Hearted Women Stay in the Wrong Friendships

Good-hearted women rarely stay in unhealthy friendships because they’re unaware.  They often stay because they were conditioned to believe that being a good friend means being endlessly forgiving, endlessly available, and endlessly understanding.

Here are some of the deeper reasons:

Early Conditioning: “Be nice, not honest.” 

Many, if not most, good-hearted women were raised to maintain harmony at all costs – in all relationships. The early rules we all learn in childhood come along with us into adulthood – and it’s not only romantic relationships that are affected.  Many good-hearted women learned that discomfort is dangerous, conflict is disrespectful, and boundaries are unkind. So, they tolerate friendships that drain them because speaking up feels like a betrayal of those early rules.

I work with many of the women who unconsciously learned both taught and untaught lessons that their emotions are secondary in importance – this is not news to most of you ladies who are reading this, but the issue that I see so often is that most of the time, we don’t realize we still follow these patterns in adulthood – even when we are logically attempting to avoid similar relationships.  

Whether in romantic relationships or in friendships, your emotions matter the most.  Most of my clients have difficulty accepting that statement.  All good-hearted people tend to believe we aren’t supposed to value our emotions more than others – we may claim intellectually that we know our emotional well-being is as important as others, but we seldom truly live by this credo.  

Good-hearted people and women will never intentionally ignore or cause emotional pain for any other person, friend or not.  Therefore, all good-hearted women must understand that valuing their emotional well-being over that of others will automatically include the consideration of others in seeking their needs.  Therefore, you do not need to consider yours as less. 

Loyalty as Identity:

Good-hearted women often define themselves by their loyalty.  They stay in a friendship because leaving feels like abandoning someone who “needs” them, and because of this, it’s very easy to confuse compassion with responsibility.  All relationships must benefit both people, and like a marriage, it won’t always be 50/50.  In a healthy friendship, we may give 80% when our friend needs that support, and that is entirely acceptable as long as we aren’t always giving the bulk of support.  Good-hearted women often learn in childhood that being the emotional support system for those around them defines their value; this is often why we stay in one-sided, emotionally supportive relationships, and it is a recipe for continued diminishment of that good-hearted woman's internal sense of value.  

Boundaries are necessary.  Healthy boundaries never harm a relationship; they reveal the relationship for what it truly is. Wanting to see the relationship for what it truly is is the need of every good-hearted person.  

Emotional Labor Training 

Good-hearted women often learn to be emotional first responders: to soothe, support, and provide stability for others. In friendship, this commonly becomes a trap.  They become the therapist, the fixer, the peacekeeper, the one who “understands.”  And they stay because they don’t want to be the reason someone else falls apart.  However, as with boundaries, if we are the only part of the friendship providing this type of emotional “labor” and support, we need to be open to the realization that it’s not a healthy or beneficial friendship.

Many women have been punished socially for setting boundaries, and because of that, they often find it difficult to maintain healthy boundaries.  The conditioning that good-hearted women receive in childhood often creates the same result in adult relationships, though the major difference in our adult relationships is that we now have the ability to set our own rules of how we can exist, rather than conform to the ones we had in childhood, to which we needed to conform. Because of the conditioning, it’s extremely common to set their own rules for internal and usually unconscious fear that they will be called cold, dramatic, selfish, or “too much.”  So, that good-hearted woman often stays silent, hoping the friendship will magically rebalance itself.

You deserve to have requirements of your relationships, and you deserve to be able to reject those in your life who do not comply with your simple demands of fairness, appreciation, kindness, and compassion.

History Feels Like Obligation 

Good-hearted women often experience a sort of obligation due to the shared history, but shared history is not the same as shared health. “We’ve been friends forever” becomes the justification for tolerating behavior that would never be acceptable from anyone new.  Bonds of history form the basis of many wonderful relationships, but those relationships must be able to grow rather than remain stagnant.  Loyalty is simply due to history; without growth and equality, it is the ingredient of diminishing value in a relationship.  

Childhood friendships where one friend was the leader cannot remain healthy because people grow, change, and have different experiences.  The resulting relationship needs to always continue to grow based on who we are as adults.  Good-hearted women often learn to believe that real friendship means unconditional loyalty - even when the conditions are harmful.  They believe that leaving makes them the villain, not the survivor.

Hope 

Good-hearted women see potential in almost everyone they meet.  They see who someone could be.  They stay because they believe in the best version of the friend, even when that version rarely shows up.  Hope is not a strategy for a lasting and healthy friendship.

The Truth Good-Hearted Women Need to Hear

A good female friendship should feel like mutual empowerment, not emotional endurance, and most definitely like a chore; it needs to be equally fulfilling to both.  A woman is not disloyal for outgrowing a friendship.  She is not unkind for protecting her peace.  She is not selfish for requiring reciprocity.  She is not dramatic for drawing attention to her emotional pain.  She is not cold for choosing alignment over obligation.

A good-hearted woman does not lose her goodness when she walks away from the wrong friendships; what she has merely done is value herself enough and finally stop abandoning herself.

I would like every good-hearted woman to know this:  You are not good-hearted because of what you endure nor because of the deeds you perform.  What you healthily choose to endure and the good deeds you perform are because you are good-hearted.  You do not need to prove to the world that you can accept or believe you should accept everything.  You have the right, and I believe the responsibility, to honor the goodness that is already in you because you are the model for the rest of us.

By David Jones,

Founder, Captive Coaching and Empowerment, LLC