There’s a specific subset of male friends in my offline life that I call my Weekday Friends™. These are guys I met through one circumstance or another—mostly work, since everything in my life revolves around work—who were already paired off when we met. Or I was.
Meaning, these friendships started platonically and stayed that way.
And for whatever reason, we never transitioned into hanging-out-on-the-weekend friends. We’ll grab coffee before work. Text a meme during that drowsy period after lunch when you can’t bring yourself to do anything productive quite yet. We’ll “like” the other’s Instagram story.
But full-time, grab dinner on Saturday night with one another’s significant others in tow friends? Not really.
We share personal news with a light touch, from taking up a new hobby to having a new baby.
I’ve only recently realized that I think of the Style Girlfriend community as Weekday Friends. We connect. We catch up. Share advice. Laugh at the latest internet meme. And then we go about our lives, happy the other is thriving on his or her own journey.
Which is why I’m in the slightly uncomfortable position now of sharing news with both you and with them that feels…abrupt.
I’m getting married!
Let me explain.
For as long as I’ve been running Style Girlfriend, I’ve kept my romantic relationships to myself. Or at least until they were over, when I could mine them for content like Taylor Swift wielding a keyboard instead of a guitar.
Meaning, no, I haven’t been celibate this whole time, but honestly a casual observer could be mistaken for thinking so.
I told myself this bent towards privacy was to keep the focus on you, the reader (and eventually, you the styling client).
And that’s true. I also came up in the era of women’s fashion bloggers who called their significant others some Sex and the City knockoff nickname à la Mr. Big, like “Suit Man” or “Mr Plaids & Pearls.”
Which made me want to die.
And look. While I admired the bravery with which these female bloggers opened their lives up to their followers and not just their closets, I also felt a little afraid for them, too.
What if Suit Man cheated? Or readers lost interest in Plaids & Pearls dot com when Mr. Plaids & Pearls no longer wanted to pose for #couplegoals photos on Instagram?
It makes sense to create more separation on Styler Girlfriend, I told myself. Those women were sharing what they wore. What supplements they took to get their hair so shiny. The vegan makeup they used. And on and on.
We didn’t do that! Here at SG HQ, we share takes, not trial and error lived experience.
Because Style Girlfriend wasn’t a lifestyle blog; it was a men’s lifestyle resource. A huge difference, in my mind, anyway.
Moreover, when those female bloggers got engaged, they became wedding bloggers who then became mommy bloggers when they had kids, and I never wanted to let my personal life dictate the editorial content we shared here. Or worse, to live my life in service of the content (“Honey, we should probably try to get pregnant by spring, so I can share gift guide picks for baby by Q4. Maybe we could score an Uppababy brand partnership!”)
Instead, I kept you the focus. Militantly.
Possibly to my own detriment.
***
When asked by friends and family why no “Style Boyfriend” ever made an appearance, though, I wouldn’t talk about the influencers and anxiety around introducing my very own Suit Man.
Instead, I would bring up boy bands.
From NKOTB to N*Sync, there’s a reason their members were advised by management to stay publicly single (despite what may have been going on behind the scenes).
It’s to keep up the appearance of availability.
Despite a fan living in the Midwest, and, y’know, being twelve years old, it was possible to convince yourself that if you happened to bump into J.C. Chasez at the grocery store, you two would of course fall in love. (Just me?)
That’s not to make some sweeping pronouncement that all Style Girlfriend readers are in love with the team here (far from it, did you see the comments on this IG reel the other day?), but I do think it breaks the fourth wall to talk about a partner on a website that bills itself as your internet wingwoman. We’re not here to talk about me and my love life, buddy. We’re here for you!
And of course, none of those paramours are here today, anyway, so just think of how many cutesy nicknames I would have had to come up with for nothing?!
But this separation meant that I closed myself off from the openness with the audience that marked the early days of SG.
Especially as I got older, I think there could have been meaningful conversations around what it means to be single when friends are marrying and popping out kids. What dating in your thirties looks like. How to meet people in the wild.
***
I don’t know if it’s because of Style Girlfriend that my brain has lived in this masculine space for so long, but I value the male friendships in my life so much, and that extends to this space.
I’ve long felt most comfortable with my male Weekday Friends who were already partnered off. Maybe it’s a symptom of being a female entrepreneur who has been asked out during business meetings (and it’s definitely the reason we talk so much on here about how to treat women) but I find myself most comfortable with men who aren’t a romantic option.
Which is why I guard my self-appointed “wingwoman” status here on SG so fiercely. Even if you’ve never replied to a tweet, or sent an email, or left a comment on Instagram, I feel like the SG community has my back and I’ve got yours.
But my hope is that you stick around even as I become a “Style Wife”—don’t worry, the name’s not changing—and don’t hold it against me that I’ve found someone else.
What we have is real and it’s special, and I’m in it for the long haul if you are.
