How being in a clique in my adolescence made me a loner in my adulthood
By Grace Winfield
I was in the living room when I heard my iPhone ring. I quickly hurried to my room to check it. It was from a group message:
Tomorrow let’s wear wedges and maxis. It’s supposed to be warm!!
It was mid-April, and I was a freshman in high school. Our group of four girls coordinated outfits at least once a week, “Mean Girls”-style. I responded in seconds.
Omg yes!! Love it.
But the truth was that I didn’t love it. I had already picked out my outfit for the next day. I was going to wear a new skirt my mom had bought me just days before, and I knew the weather was going to be perfect for it. I figured that a skirt with wedges was hardly any different from a maxi dress with wedges. I was going to wear what I’d planned anyway. But deep down I knew better.
The next day, my friends shot me glares and short, snippy comments.
“That’s an interesting skirt,” one of them said to me facetiously, the others giggling.
I thought I heard the others whispering that I was purposely trying to look better than them. One of them even told me what I wasn’t wearing didn’t look good. .
I felt panicked. I wiped my sweaty palms on the hem of my rayon skirt, trying to maintain my composure and relax. As I fought back tears, my immediate thought was get to a bathroom, now.
But instead, I calmed myself down. I made up for my insubordinate act with shallow compliments and constant flattery for the remainder of the week. I playfully touched my friend Sarah’s hair, “you’re so pretty, S,” I said. She would be the first I’d get on my side. She always was the easiest. It was harder to get to the others. They loved the feeling of superiority, so inferiority was what I had to give them. “I wish I was as pretty as you are.” “How do you look so good all of the time?” “I hate my stomach—you are so skinny.”
After a couple days, the tension eased up. It was a relief.. No more worrying about being conveniently left behind after class and being ignored at the lunch table. But deep down, I felt kind of empty. Why did I care what my friends thought, and if they were really my friends, why would they treat me that way? These weren’t new thoughts.
***
My clique started in elementary school. All but one of the members had an older sister by 6 years, give or take, who grew up together just as we had, though not all of them had remained friends. So our families were acquainted with each other. Coming from a small town, it was slim pickings in the friend department. We all first met when we took dance classes at a local studio, and shared birthday parties after being in the same classes at pre-school and kindergarten.
Then came middle school, when we really cemented ourselves as a unit. This was a time when popularity felt like one of the single most important things in life, and not everyone met the standards. For me, being in the clique meant instant invites to parties, double dates to the movies and attending school proms as an underclassman. But while I was busy pining for approval and power in my clique, I lost friends who didn’t fit the image we wanted to project. At the time, I told myself that we just weren’t alike anymore, that it was all a part of growing up. In retrospect, I see that I was the one who changed.
By the time high school came around, our clique remained intact. Luckily for me, high school was a game I played well. I graduated at the top of my class. I was a four-year varsity letterman and a captain. I held leadership positions in multiple clubs. I was well-known. I was popular, and so were all of my friends. From the surface, it was obvious why we were friends. My friends were all smart, pretty jocks too. We were in the same clubs, on the same teams, and always, always in the same friend group for as long as our classmates had known us.
I never told them about my family issues, I never came to them about my accomplishments. We never talked about school work, literature, music or current events. Just high school drama. It sucked. All the high school movies are about loners who are trying to get in with a clique. Here I was in one, and I kept feeling the urge that I wanted out. My friend group made me feel empty inside. I felt alone, and no amount of group texts or popularity was going to satisfy me.
What really struck me the most is when I realized just how much being in my clique affected people’s perceptions of me. It hit me one day when I was partnered with a classmate in English. After our assignment, we just casually talked and joked about school, life and what shows we were watching on TV lately.
“You know, I always thought you were stuck up, but you’re really cool.”
I didn’t really know how to respond to her. I thanked her and laughed it off, but then I asked why.
“Well, you know, just you and your friends. I don’t know, some of them are just kind of mean and you’re all always together, so.”
***
The formation of cliques is simple to understand. People are just naturally inclined to become friends with people that are similar to them and share their interests. There are the goths, the techies, the jocks and the makeup gurus. The thespians, the preps, the alternatives and the rebels. Some friend circles overlap. Some cliques party together, but there also tend to be distinct lines.
What’s less obvious is how a school environment affects the formation of cliques. Daniel McFarland offers a perfect lesson in how cliques form in some schools in his dissertation, and why they barely form in others. "Larger schools that offer more choice and variety are the most likely to form hierarchies and cliques and self-segregation. In smaller schools, and in smaller classrooms, you force people to interact.”
In other words, he found that students in a big school environment have more social options, and are more inclined to be exclusive with friends. Whereas in a smaller environment, students don’t have as many options and are forced to mix with the other students. I went to a big school. It is described as “distant rural,” and is the only high school in the entire district. Because of its isolation, there are 1,328 students enrolled in the 2018-19 school year. I graduated in a class of roughly 400 students.
On the outside, cliques always seem like untouchable groups that don’t care about what other people think, but I can tell you that is exactly what motivates a clique and its members. If our peers considered us popular and cool, then we had to do what we thought cool and popular kids do. Hook ups. Sneaking out of the house. Underage partying. Each questionable thing I did to advance that “coolness factor” was just another point added to the imaginary scoreboard. It was a constant competition for who was the prettiest, the coolest, who did the guys like the most. I’d like to pretend I was beyond it, but of course I wasn’t.
Cliques have a hierarchical structure and are exclusive in nature, so not everyone is going to make the cut. It’s because of this competition for power that the negative effects of social cliques outweigh the positive effects. There could only be one leader, and we all fought for it. We’d never dare admit it out loud, but actions speak louder than words anyway—and our actions were shady.
One of my friends started a rumor I was pregnant in 10th grade. Yes, 10th. Luckily, two of the other girls in the clique came to me after it hit the high school mainstream and told me all about it. In 9th grade, one of them made out with the guy she knew I was talking to—all because she had a crush on him in middle school. I never even confronted her about it, either. Letting her know it upset me would only give her the satisfaction she wanted. My friends rarely had good intentions.
Everyone is familiar with bullying and peer pressure, but in a clique, these issues are heightened. Even if I didn’t want to go to a party or go on a date with a guy, I would be told how lame or immature I was. But I’d rather be in than out. I can’t repeat some of the rumors my friends spread about girls on the outside they were threatened by, or the hurtful things they said to them. The scariest thing about it was that people promoted our bad behavior. Girls laughed at the public berating of other girls by my friends.
***
I spoke to Dr. Miriam Liss, professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Mary Washington. She explained to me that the lonely feelings made sense. I was only accepted by my friends in the clique because I became the person on the surface they wanted to be, that we all wanted to be at one point, not because they appreciated who I was on the inside.
The Encyclopedia of Human Relationship defines loneliness as “…the distress that results from discrepancies between ideal and perceived social relationships.”
Making friends was never an issue. But the friendships I had with members of my clique was based on a fake version of myself that I used to assimilate in middle school and never let go of. I didn’t feel genuinely connected to them when I was around them anymore, and I certainly didn’t feel satisfied. If anything, I felt worse. Drained. And kind of annoyed.
I stayed in the clique for so long because it was easier than starting over and being alone. I found it hard to believe my friends in the clique felt much different than I did. We were still friends because, well, we were always around each other. We knew things about each other’s lives, our strengths and weaknesses. It was the classic social mere exposure effect (Say who invented this concept or something,). Essentially, mere exposure is when the more you see or hear something, the more likely you are to like it and eventually, grow accustom to it. I once liked my clique, but as the years went by, we were just going through the motions.
Being in a clique limited my social circle, and delayed my discovery of who I truly was. I was so caught up with maintaining my image, until I realized that it wasn’t my image at all—it was just some superficial identity we all strived to become.
***
Eventually I came to terms with the fact that most of them just weren’t my kind of people. Our friendship was built on envy and insecurity. In 11th grade, things started to change for me. I had different desires and ambitions and I wanted to pursue them. I started to own who I was, or at least who I wanted to be. With college around the corner, I asked myself why I still continued this façade. In a few years, we weren’t even going to be at the same schools. We weren’t going to have the same peers, followers and enemies. I would be all on my own, and that excited me.
I said goodbye to Lilly Pulitzer, monograms and Polo and started dressing however I felt when I woke up. I hung out with people in different grades and made new friends, friends I wasn’t allowed to have before. Eventually, I think we all had the same idea that high school would soon end. Most of us started hanging out with people from different schools and switching up our styles, but not everyone was confident enough to embrace the change.
When I finally went to college, I continued to pursue self-exploration. I became the discoverer, as Dr. Liss said. Meaning, I tried on different identities—through fashion, music, and even hair styles. I have made so many different friends since coming to college. Friends who were into the same shows and music as me, friends who could argue politics, friends who have the same career path, and those who I loved being friends with because they were completely different than me.
Of course, not belonging to a clique has its setbacks. Gone are the days of guaranteed sleepovers and gossip-filled group messages, but none of the advantages of the clique appeal to me anymore. Some people are still friends and some aren’t; I still talk to two of my friends from the group, but we only truly became close when we broke away from the limitations of being in a group who shared everything. Now, we can actually share our thoughts and feelings in confidence.
The best part of not belonging to a clique is knowing that those closest to you are there because they genuinely want to be. Surrounding yourself based on that criteria will only raise your friendship standards and promote healthy relationship. My friends don’t need a group name, matching outfits, or double dates and dual birthday parties to substantiate our friendship.