The Deep Romance of the Girls’ Getaway
Rhonda on why holidays with women friends are the most sustaining and sacrosanct of all.
“Going away with your friends is like having an affair, only you don’t end up with come all over your face.”
Lying in our cabana sharing hair-of-the-dog jugs of sangria and picking at cheese-laden nachos after a big night out in Ibiza Town, we try not to spit out our wine. Cackling, we all agree that that’s exactly what this feels like: illicit, almost too good to be true. I must have done really very marvellous things in a past life, I think, to get to hang out in the Mediterranean sunshine for four days with these three epic women. These four days stolen from real life, glowing, priceless…
It’s like being sixteen again. Four nights in a row, we go out dancing and carousing til dawn, then we sit out on our balcony in our dresses still clinging to us with sweat, shuck off the shoes we’ve somehow danced more than 20km worth of steps in, peel off our false eyelashes, and watch the sun come over the Med over a few beers.
When we’ve come down enough from all our merrymaking to contemplate bed, we sleep a few hours before heading back poolside to start the whole cycle again, ignoring any but the most urgent messages from home, debating which bar to hit up for tonight’s sunset views and the best tunes.
This is girlfriend time – perhaps the most precious and nourishing time of all once your children have flown the nest or are barely ever home, lost in their own social whirls. And it’s also the most hard-won time – getting a long weekend when we can all be away at the same time is the devil’s own work, between all our family and career commitments. And with teen dramas and work stress and parental illness and even deaths on our respective plates this past year, at times it’s seemed it may never come to pass.
But we’re here now, and with no domestic mundanities claiming our attention, we can finally be – if only for a few days – who we really are, with the people who really get us as only women can get one another.
I was late to girlfriends’ getaways, having been in one relationship after another since my teens. In fact, I missed out on a whole bunch of things because of being with men, including living with girlfriends. It’s something we often talk about, however: the fantasy many of us have of ending up in a female commune together – something a bit like the cul-de-sac in Barbie. Until that day, I’ll be living for these holidays with my besties.
And there have been some corkers. Krakow: three of us flying in from different airports to spend a weekend together seeing the sights, eating ALL the pierogis and leaving no bar unvisited in our quest to try all the vodka shots in town. Dancing ’til daybreak and setting the world to rights. And Valencia: around 12 of us, shamelessly ogling artworks and ponytailed flamenco dancers alike. And over the years, lots of drunken plane journeys and chatting up of foreign taxi drivers…
And then there was the cat-with-the-cream, pinch-me feeling of astonishment and euphoria and plain jamminess I had waking in a magnificent villa near San Gimignano to the most absurdly Tuscan of views over rolling vineyards and lines of cypress trees and knowing that I was spending four days in actual heaven with six of the most glorious women I know - taking in the culture (if assessing the size of David’s manhood in Florence counts), dancing, eating ourselves daft, assessing the local talent on Bumble, and yes, drinking jugs of sangria by the pool. Or was it Bellinis? No matter – what counted was the company, and the time and space to be ourselves.
In Ibiza we go deep, confessing the most painful but also the most joyous of intimacies, crying and laughing, often at the same time. We share space, a bathroom without a lock, beds. We walk around naked without shame at our differences, our ageing bodies that are not what they were but still do the job very nicely thank you. That are healthy and give us pleasure.
We share eyeshadows and pots of glitter and trade clothes. We help one another to do our hair, we vote on our outfits. We remind each other how beautiful we are, still, in spite of or perhaps because of everything we have been through. When we’re in bars and clubs, we look out for one another, wade in when things on the dancefloor get a bit too frisky.
We are older and wiser than we were, considered and serious, then the next moment we’re tittering like schoolgirls at the shallowest of frivolities and most puerile of jokes. We gossip about others around the pool, rate their tattoos, their six-packs, their boob jobs. A DJ is playing over by the bar and our limbs, toasted by the sun, start twitching, ready for another night on the dancefloor.
And in my head, whatever I’m doing, that’s where I am in my soul – on the dancefloor with my girlfriends.
In memory of Catherine Thomas
