What Mindy Kaling Got Wrong About Best Friends

Random Musing
I just finished reading Mindy Kaling's book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). It was pretty entertaining, and I found myself laughing out loud exactly twice. I chuckled silently to myself many more times than that. This post isn't going to be a book review though. The book is a quick and fun read and if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, then I'd go ahead and spend a couple of hours reading it. I'm more interested in one very small selection from the chapter about Best Friend Rights and Responsibilities:

I know when you fall in love with someone that you will completely forget about me. That hurts my feelings, but it is okay. Please try to remember to text me, if you can, if you know I have something going on in my life, like a work promotion or something.
Re-read that. One more time. I'll wait. Done yet? Okay, good.

So that is the biggest piece of bullshit I've seen on the written page in a very long time. And I read the news. I mean, come on. You're giving your alleged best friend explicit permission to ignore you, to blow you off. Why Mindy, why? Why would you do that? People who blow you off are not good friends. They definitely aren't your best friend. Best friends don't blow each other off. I think that's actually a rule in the Unwritten Best Friend Constitution:

1A. Do not ignore your best friend for a boy. No matter how cute they are.
The only reason I can think of that Mindy Kaling condones this behavior is that she does the same thing to her friends when she meets a boy and so wants to pretend that it's okay. And having read her book and liked it, I really hope that's not the case. Because it isn't okay. If you entirely drop your friends - and I count only getting in touch for incredibly huge life events the same as "dropping" - when you meet a guy and fall in love, then you probably didn't deserve good friends in the first place. And definitely not a best friend.

Okay, rant over.  I just had to make sure that people were aware that Mindy Kaling made a mistake about one crucial aspect of best friendship.

In case you were wondering, I didn't find anything else in the book infuriating. It was a very pleasant read otherwise. So to try and end this on a more positive note, here are two quotes I really liked:

"One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about."

"There are time when friends have said they hooked up with someone and all it means is that they had a highly anticipated kissing session. Other times it's a full-on all-night sex-a-thon. Can't we have a universal understanding of the term, once and for all? From now on, let's all agree that hooking up = sex. Everything else is 'made out.' And if you're older than twenty-eight, then just kissing someone doesn't count for crap and is not even worth mentioning. Unless you're Mormon, in which case you're going to hell."

Leave reply

Back to Top