‘Host a Galentine’s hot dog pyjama party with me as someone who low-key hates hosting’, says Olivia Noceda, a San Francisco-based recipe content creator with over half a million followers on Instagram. ‘I take Galentine’s Day very seriously, ok? I will take literally any excuse to celebrate my girls’, she croons in a previous post (there are many days of prep for G-Day). She shows off her cookie boxes with ‘my five favourite sweet treats… I wanted the box to give off a girly vibe, with as much pink as possible.’

Galentine’s Day, which is February 13 (a day before Valentine’s Day), began as a joke in more buoyantly humorous times, originating in a 2010 episode of American cult comedy show Parks and Recreation. ‘What’s Galentine’s Day?’ quips Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. ‘Oh, it’s only the best day of the year. Every February 13^th, my lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home and we come and kick it, breakfast style’.

But what began as a send-up of girlfriends-culture on the eve of V-Day (‘uteruses before duderuses’ and ‘ovaries before brovaries’) has become serious – as serious, if not more politically charged in some circles, as Valentine’s Day itself.

This is a reflection of the rising cultural premium that has become attached to friendship, something that, like so much else that goes through the trend mill now – cottage cheese and fibre among them – has been hiding in plain sight all along, and for good reason: it’s ubiquitous, important, and somewhat boring. Academics have been increasingly trying to capitalise on its once leaden, unsexy significance. Durham historian Amanda Herbert’s work on 17th-century female friendships is driven by the ways in which ‘women were expected to hold families and friends together… In this period, women were imagined as more friendly and loving than were men’, notes Herbert. Nothing much has changed there. Then as now, too, female friendships were imagined as an important form of social glue; in a chaotic and fractured world, they were seen by early modern philosophers as a way of ‘keeping people together’.

According to Herbert,

many women took these encouragements seriously. To make and maintain friendships, they wrote thousands of letters. They talked, read, and prayed together. They took care of each other’s bodies: brushing hair, dressing, napping, and sharing meals. They took care of each other’s children. They hand-crafted clothes and jewellery and confections and gave them to one another as gifts. They shared strategic political information. They made medical recommendations.

For alumna of close-knit school friendship groups, netball teams, readers of Mumsnet, keen watchers of Sex and the City, this will all seem familiar. Female friendship at all ages enjoys an easier physicality and closeness than male friendship. It is customary for women to effuse to each other about each other – and Galentine’s is an extreme version, a big fat effusion of pink cakes and girly embrace – but there is also scope for real and enduring friendship, akin to sisterhood. Some of this descends into bitterness, drama and obligation; and the challenge of being a woman who cherishes and depends on her female friendships is to get expectations right. How close to family can you be without being family? How close do you want to be?

Elizabeth Day tackled the bedrock and behemoth that is modern female friendship in her 2023 book Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, where she explored the obligation, desperation and, frankly, the ‘work’ required to maintain friendships sparked through ephemeral, historical bonding experiences, like spin class, or having once been extras together in the school play. She writes astutely about the doleful dedication to ‘White Wine Wednesdays’, gone through in deference to the long-dead joy of moribund friendships, out of fear of being a bad person, or being abandoned, or both.

In the social sciences, female friendship has, predictably, attracted lots of ‘research’ that doesn’t seem entirely necessary, such as the obvious idea that having three or four close female friends is beneficial. But there are also some more interesting findings, such as that female friendships can also harm mental health through the typical ‘gal’ activity of rumination, the repeated retrieval of worries, which can make them worse. According to a study published in Personality and Individual Differences, ‘gender differences in depression result, in part, from women’s tendency to ruminate more than men.’

Galentine’s Day is doused in all the trappings of good fun, the pretzel barks, the games and the ribaldry. But under the pink, the Taylor Swiftism, and excitement about a possible Spice Girls reunion, lies the roiling dynamics of any hotbed of intimacy – good and bad.