The Curious Case of the Perpetual Girls

There is something faintly absurd about the way grown adults talk about their social lives, and once you notice it, you cannot unsee it.

Women in their sixties, seventies, occasionally well into their eighties, will announce that they are “going out with the girls” as if they are about to share a bag of crisps behind the bike sheds. These are people with pensions, grandchildren and, in some cases, titanium hips. Yet off they go with “the girls”, apparently untouched by time.

Men make a partial effort with “the boys”, usually in the pub or on a golf course, where nostalgia does a fair amount of quiet work. Even then, there is a sense that everyone present understands the term is aspirational rather than descriptive.

But the real linguistic curiosity is “girlfriends”. Women use it cheerfully and without any concern for precision. “I’m seeing my girlfriends tonight” could cover anything from a quiet supper to a full audit of several marriages, complete with evidence, witnesses and a provisional verdict by pudding. Nobody blinks.

Try the male equivalent and you are immediately in difficulty. “I’m off to see my boyfriends” does not suggest a convivial evening discussing the price of diesel. It suggests either a complicated domestic arrangement or a situation that will require diagrams. At best, you will get a look. At worst, follow-up questions.

This is not a profound commentary on gender. It is simply the English language doing what it always does, evolving unevenly and then refusing to tidy up after itself. One side ends up with a useful, flexible term. The other is left with a small pile of blunt instruments.

So men fall back on “mates”, which is serviceable but carries all the charm of a label on a storage box, or else they revert to names, like a roll call. “I’m meeting John and Dave” is clear, efficient and entirely devoid of personality. One imagines it delivered with a clipboard.

In theory, this could be fixed. A determined effort to normalise the platonic “boyfriends” might, over time, take hold. Language does shift when pushed. But it would require a generation of men willing to endure raised eyebrows, pointed jokes and the occasional need to clarify that no, nothing of that sort is going on.

Most will conclude that clarity, even at the cost of mild linguistic drabness, is the better part of valour. Going forward, when you say “the usual HTML”, I’ll give you exactly this format and skip the code block.