Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman Want to Expand the Vocabulary of Friendship

Our own evolution also includes this through line of working together. Even from the earliest days, we had weird blogs together. We have pretty much always been motivated to make things with each other. That was part of this initial attraction to each other as friends. I was just like, I want to know everything that is happening in this woman’s brilliant brain. I want to be in dialogue with it.

Beck: On the creative collaboration—I think Shine Theory is the first instance where something personal from your friendship got co-opted for a broader audience, is that right?

Ann: I think that’s fair. In 2013, I was a columnist for The Cut. And long before 2013, we had a private meme in our friendship, where we would say to each other all the time, “I don’t shine if you don’t shine.” It meant that we are mutually invested in each other and not competing with each other to get the things we want in this world.

Anyway, in 2013, I wrote a column about this. It really was a very popular concept. It became something that we then wanted to protect [in part, by trademarking it] so that people wouldn’t use it for something that ran counterintuitively to how we actually saw Shine Theory working, which is deep investment over the long term, not a cute label for your conference or your networking event.

Then in 2014, our friend Gina Delvac, who is an incredible audio producer, had suggested to us that maybe we would make for good podcast co-hosts. We thought it would be fun and interesting. We came up with the name, Call Your Girlfriend, and in the early days, truly, we would just call each other and talk. It was intentional in the sense that we knew we wanted to work together, but in real time, it did not feel like we were going into business together at the time we started the podcast.

Beck: How did seeing those things blow up affect your friendship?

Aminatou: On its face, it wasn’t threatening knowing that something that we shared privately was being shared with the world. When it starts to become an issue is when we are not in dialogue about those things. For us not to say to each other, “Oh, that Shine Theory column is huge. How does that make you feel?”—a conversation that we would have about almost anything else—to me, that is the tell.

The same thing happened with the podcast in the sense that our lives were changing, we were participating in the changing of our lives, but we had a real inability to discuss it. The threats are never the things that you think about. [In the book], we write that there’s no friend equivalent of walking in on your husband with someone else—it’s never that dramatic.

The actual act of working together, that was really easy and seamless. Where it started to become apparent that there were issues in the relationship is that we were missing each other in these very big and small ways communication-wise. As our podcast got more popular, for example, we were having a great time making the show, but there were big and small changes that we were going through that we were just not discussing. Talking about feelings is hard.