Sorority Friend Quotes

This is a part of post-college life that nobody ever warns you about. Your social life is no longer dropped into your lap by virtue of shared classes and extracurricular activities. Relationships, whether with friends, family, or romantic partners—from here on out, they’re going to take a lot more work. No more built-in friends at the sorority, or hollering down the stairs when I need my mom. It’s certainly not going to be as easy to meet guys now that I’m done with school. It’s not like I can just chat up the cute guy in econ class anymore.

I know many friends who loved their sororities. I wasn’t traumatized. I was just bored.

When I couldn’t take the hunger anymore, I called Taylor and told her everything. She screamed so loud, I had to hold the phone away from my ear. She came right over with a black-bean burrito and a strawberry-banana smoothie. She kept shaking her head and saying, “That Zeta Phi slut.” “It wasn’t just her, it was him, too,” I said, between bites of my burrito. “Oh, I know. Just you wait. I’m gonna drag my nails across his face when I see him. I’ll leave him so scarred, no girl will ever hook up with him again.” She inspected her manicured nails like they were artillery. “When I go to the salon tomorrow, I’m gonna tell Danielle to make them sharp.” My heart swelled. There are some things only a friend who’s known you your whole life can say, and instantly, I felt a little better. “You don’t have to scar him.” “But I want to.” She hooked her pinky finger with mine. “Are you okay?” I nodded. “Better, now that you’re here.” When I was sucking down the last of my smoothie, Taylor asked me, “Do you think you’ll take him back?” I was surprised and really relieved not to hear any judgement to her voice. “What would you do?” I asked her. “It’s up to you.” “I know, but…would you take him back?” “Under ordinary circumstances, no. If some guy cheated on me while we were on a break, if he so much as looked at another girl, no. He’d be donzo.” She chewed on her straw. “But Jeremy’s not some guy. You have a history together.” “What happened to all that talk about scarring him?” “Don’t get it twisted, I hate him to death right now. He effed up in a colossal way. But he’ll never be just some guy, not to you. That’s a fact.” I didn’t say anything. But I knew she was right. “I could still round up my sorority sisters and go slash his tires tonight.” Taylor bumped my shoulder. “Hmm? Whaddyathink?” She was trying to make me laugh. It worked. I laughed for the first time in what felt like a long time.

The social codes are different, distinctly preppy, fraternity-sorority, hip, flip, fast-and-cute, nauseating, and artificial. I have no doubt that the majority of these people are interesting, likeable, intelligent people. Unfortunately, they've been taught not to show it. The problem lies in socializing. When these people socialize, they don a common "mask." They talk a certain way (hip, flip) act a certain way, do certain things, all of which have been defined as socially acceptable. By acting in such a way, one makes "friends." With time, friends use their masks less and less, and a true, deep friendship results.

Indirect aggression is characterized by a clique of relatively powerless (compared with their male counterparts) girls or women who exert power “indirectly” by bullying, gossiping about, slandering, and shaming one girl or woman so that she will be shunned by her female intimates, thrown out of her college sorority, perhaps fired from her job, divorced by her husband, and definitely dropped from the A-list of partygoers. Gossip is a chief weapon of indirect aggression. Slandering another girl or woman (“she’s a slut,” “she’s … different,” “she really thinks she’s something”) leads to her being ostracized by her female friends and peers, a punishment that girls and women experience as being put into solitary confinement or as a social death.

A Lake Charles-based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally's very dear friend and worl-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both woman had joined sororities at LSU. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other's houses. Each loved the other's children. Shirley knew Sally's parents and even consulted Sally's mother when the two go to "fussing to much." They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts and jointly scoured the newspaper for notices of upcoming cultural events they had, when they were neighbors in Lake Charles, attended together. One day when I was staying as Shirley's overnight guest in Opelousas, I noticed a watercolor picture hanging on the guestroom wall, which Sally had painted as a gift for Shirley's eleven-year-old daughter, who aspired to become a ballerina. With one pointed toe on a pudgy, pastel cloud, the other lifted high, the ballerina's head was encircled by yellow star-like butterflies. It was a loving picture of a child's dream--one that came true. Both women followed the news on TV--Sally through MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Shirley via Fox News's Charles Krauthammer, and each talked these different reports over with a like-minded husband. The two women talk by phone two or three times a week, and their grown children keep in touch, partly across the same politcal divide. While this book is not about the personal lives of these two women, it couldn't have been written without them both, and I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

Nearly half of all associational memberships are church-religious context. Religious worshipers and people who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; school service groups; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion, and study groups; school fraternities and sororities; farm organization; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.

Sorry about that. For years, my sister has labored under the impression that she’s funny. My father and I have humored her in this.” Rylann waved this off. “No apology necessary. She’s just protective of you. That’s what siblings do—at least, I assume it is.” “No brothers or sisters for you?” Kyle asked. Rylann shook her head. “My parents had me when they were older. I asked for a sister every birthday until I was thirteen, but it wasn’t in the cards.” She shrugged. “But at least I have Rae.” “When did you two meet?” “College. We were in the same sorority pledge class. Rae is…” Rylann cocked her head, trying to remember. “What’s that phrase men always use when describing their best friend? The thing about the hooker and the hotel room.” “If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, he’d be the first person I’d call. A truer test of male friendship there could not be.” Rylann smiled. “That’s cute. And a little scary, actually, that all you men have planned ahead for such an occasion.” She waved her hand. “Well, there you go. If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, Rae would be the first person I’d call.” Kyle rested his arms on the table and leaned in closer. “Counselor, you’re so by the book, the first person you’d call if you woke up next to a dead hooker would be the FBI.” “Actually, I’d call the cops. Most homicides aren’t federal crimes, so the FBI wouldn’t have jurisdiction.” Kyle laughed. He reached out and tucked back a lock of hair that had fallen into her eyes. “You really are a law geek.” At the same moment, they both realized what he was doing. They froze, eyes locked, his hand practically cupping the side of her cheek. Then they heard someone clearing her throat. Rylann and Kyle turned and saw Jordan standing at their table. “Wine, anyone?” With her blue eyes dancing, she set two glasses in front of them. “I’ll leave you two to yourselves now.” Rylann watched as Jordan strolled off. “I think you’re going to have some explaining to do after I leave,” she whispered to Kyle. “Oh, without a doubt, she’s going to be all up in my business over this.

We weren't together all the time like we used to be - she had her sorority friends, I had my friends from my hall. But we still had each other.

EVERYTHING we do is seen as instrumental towards marketing ourselves for the college admission boards, or for the job market, or to help us rush a fraternity or sorority, or to help us win friends, or to help us be a more attractive potential partner.

But Taylor was Taylor, and dismissed both options out of hand. She’d watched her mother’s life: lunches, teas, commitments to charity work that allowed her group of wealthy friends to continue living in their sorority days, never aging, never losing the shallowness that permeated their lives. Taylor knew that they did good work, that their charities made a difference on some level, but couldn’t stand the idea of doing it herself. That