Shailee Thompson: Sidekick to Soulmate – Reflection on the evolution of female friendships in film
Picture the scene, a plucky, neurotic, independent working girl is walking down a big city street/main office area/navigating a self-serve cafeteria while lamenting about her love life. At her side is a sassy, sardonic soundboard of a friend (possibly played by the incomparable Judy Greer). She makes humorous quips, her sexual confidence is both a foil to the leading lady’s more repressed demeanour but will also encourage our main girl to get freaky with the male love interest, and then she will completely disappear for a good two thirds of the film. After the third act break-up she’ll return, providing some solemn pearls of wisdom that allow our leading lady to get her happy ever after with her leading man. Afterall, the rom-com bestie’s only function is to propel the romantic plot of another higher-billed woman.
Sound familiar?
Now don’t get me wrong, your girl loves a nineties/naughties rom-com. I grew up on them, still gravitate to a rewatch when they’re suggested on Netflix, but when I consider how these films represent female friendships in comparison to the ones that I have in my life, it’s clear it really isn’t like the movies.
But this time I think the films fall short.
It’s something I thought a lot about when writing a novel so heavily influenced by that era of film, and it’s something that I think is having a very real moment in current discourse. Essays like ‘Is having a Boyfriend embarrassing?’ are appearing in Vogue, SELF is asking ‘Are Best Friends the new Boyfriends?’, and we’re still talking about the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ (which, used to just be called the ‘loneliness epidemic’ btw). Women are broadcasting their friendships and gleefully returning to girlhood. My algorithm is full of women bonding and building relationships while bedazzling books, holding movie nights and smashing TVs in rage rooms. Women are grateful/honest/openly boasting about the way our friendships build us up and provide us emotional and intellectual support. And why wouldn’t we? Multiple studies have shown that strong female friendships literally make us live longer. They make us happier, more resilient, confident, you could even say they ‘complete’ us. In my case, they even lead to a little creative inspiration.
I don’t think I’m reflecting on anything that is unique to current society, either. My mother has friendships with women that are going on fifty years now, women who I was once shocked to find out were not my “real” aunts when I made the discovery as a child. These friendships have outlasted marriages, careers, unfortunate perms of the eighties. They’ve known and grown with each other as their identities began to incorporate the roles of wife, mother and grandmother, but before all of that they were friends.
When I first came up with the idea of How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates, my only goal was to combine the two seemingly opposing genres of ‘rom-com’ and ‘slasher’, but at the same time as I started writing the novel one of my best friends moved to a new country. We worked together for nine years, our desks faced each other, and after almost a decade of in-jokes, trauma dumps and communicating through facial expressions we were going from being a metre apart every day to having almost twelve thousand kilometres between us. Obviously, I was excited and supportive of my friend’s new adventure, but I was also going to miss her. Life was going to be different, and change is scary after all. It was through writing How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates that I was able to reflect on our friendship (one that was built on watching horror movies, as it were!), write a love letter to its endurance, and rewrite the leading lady/best friend dynamic that never really sat right when I watched it on screen.
More recent films like Someone Great, Booksmart, Bridesmaids and Girls Trip—while not falling neatly into the ‘rom-com’ genre—touch on the joy, support and hilarity of modern female friendships, but I think we can still watch and enjoy those classic rom-coms…
Maybe just make a girls night of it.
How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates by Shailee Thompson is published by Simon & Schuster on 12 February 2026
