Honestly I Kinda Loathe #SquadGoals
For a year now, #SquadGoals has been the hashtag you can’t get away from—ever since Taylor Swift and her merry band of model besties became the nation’s biggest primary source of friendspiration.
And confession, nothing makes me twitch with barfy rage like seeing it pop up in my various social feeds, where it’s always attached to some moment of photogenic togetherness that is totally, obviously staged. (Pro tip: Nobody color-coordinates their bathing suits and then flops on the beach in a perfect isosceles triangle formation by accident. NOBODY.)
Why do I wish that #SquadGoals would vanish forever into the same Twitter black hole that ate #StuffIFoundInMyNose?
The difference between a squad and a clique is basically indiscernible.
Maybe I’m just wary of anything that looks too much like a Mean Girls sequel, but there’s something a tad off-putting about an elite social group, operating under the quiet authority of one tall, blonde queen bee, with membership contingent on her approval. I mean, Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen, a pair of literal superheroes, had to publicly beg on Twitter for admission to Tay Sway’s squad. And did they even get in?! It’s a mystery. A frightening, sinister mystery.
The hashtag-ification of friendship is awful.
That is, unless we’re talking about the awesome all-girl political rock band I’m forming with EXACTLY THAT NAME. (Title of our first hit single: “You’ve Been Unfollowed.” I’ll take the Grammy, the VMA, and the Nobel Peace Prize now, thank you.) But when you take female friendships in all their complicated, multifaceted glory, and then turn them into glossy, filtered, superficial social candy, too much of the good stuff gets lost.
Plus, my squad goals are better than #squadgoals—and so are yours.
Here’s a fun thought experiment: Leave the hashtag out of it, and make a list of your actual squad goals, a.k.a. the things you aspire to in your friendships. Mine mostly consists of things like “sent me a handwritten card when my dog died,” or “held my hair back when I puked on prom night,” or “gave me her newborn baby to hold even though I’d literally just told her I’d had a nightmare about stepping on his head.”
And let’s be honest: Don’t all our lists look kind of like that?
Because the best things about best friends aren’t made for putting on Insta; they’re all too sad or sloppy or ugly or just straight-up boring. And yet, unlike the posed-and-filtered snapshots that always pop up under the #squadgoals hashtag, those are the moments you remember, without ever taking a picture.
‘Cause as it turns out, real squad goals have nothing to do with how cute you and your friends look when you’re all joy-jumping simultaneously in color-coordinated bikinis.
Although, okay, that does look really fun.
Are you pom poms a-blazing for #squadgoals or do you think there are more meaningful ways to honor your besties?
