'It's sacred': The secret friend-making power of the women's bathroom

Lexi Duncan and her best friend, Ashley Lawson, live in different cities, so they don’t get to see each other often. But on one of their rare nights together, in Fort Wayne, Ind., a few years ago, they both went to the women’s bathroom. Duncan, 33, filmed as the two looked in the mirror "because we barely spend time together and she looked so cute that night,” Duncan tells Yahoo. They primped, they posed and then another girl burst into the bathroom, clearly distressed and asked, “How do I get rid of a guy?” Duncan and Lawson didn’t miss a beat. “We just immediately were like, yes, absolutely,” says Duncan. She and Lawson introduced themselves, announced on the spot, “we’re your friends,” and asked the new girl questions to establish a credible back story. Because, of course. The two best friends took their new bathroom buddy back to their table and called her an Uber at the end of the night. “Ashley and I kind of sacrificed our one night together, but we chatted, got to know her, it was a chill night,” says Duncan.

The whole thing was caught on Duncan’s phone camera. The video — captioned “I love meeting girls in the bathroom lmao” — generated 1.6 million likes on TikTok and comments about the safe haven that is the women’s restroom.

The girls’ bathroom trope is familiar to many women in real life, and it’s reflected in pop culture too. A friendship (to say the least) is born between Brittany Snow and Malin Akerman’s characters in that bathroom scene in the first episode of Netflix’s The Hunting Wives. In an episode of The Office, the male employees venture into the women’s room to discover it’s replete with couches and candles — the kind of place you can bond.

Tears have been shed, tea has been spilled and friendships have been formed in the women’s bathroom. So what is it about this ubiquitous place that imbues it with a special friend-making power that frankly, just doesn’t seem to be a thing at the men’s urinals?

The ‘platonic intimacy of women’

Amid the loneliness epidemic that seems to be hitting men especially hard, there’s a lot of research and general conversation happening about what makes men’s and women’s friendships so different. A piece of that puzzle seems to be that “women experience more platonic intimacy compared to men,” Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of Fighting for our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women's Relationships, tells Yahoo Life. Research suggests there’s a higher expectation for intimacy in women’s friendships, which comes in part from the central role that emotional connection, openness and even physical affection play in their relationships.

For Duncan, the women’s bathroom is a perfect setting for platonic intimacy. “You go in there and refresh, and tell your friend, 'Girl, you need some gum,' and it’s a place where you can have more intimate conversations, even more so than when you’re sitting next to one another at the bar,” she says. As one viral video last year showed, men seem to be more comfortable with side-by-side interactions, while women tend to relate face to face. Women are “socialized from a very young age to tell others how we feel, that it’s safe to cry and, when we interact with one another, it’s encouraged to listen and validate one another,” says Bayard Jackson. It’s even part of how girls play when they’re young: They play pretend facing one another, whereas young boys do activities next to one another, says Vivian Zayas, a Cornell University psychology professor.

From a young age, "we’re trained to nurture, so it’s natural to experience more intimacy together," Bayard Jackson says of women. With the groundwork for intimacy laid, it can happen fast in that very intimate space: the bathroom.

The three S’s of female friendship (and bathrooms)

While writing her book, Bayard Jackson pored over voluminous research on women’s friendships. She’s distilled much of that work into what she calls her “framework of the three affinities of female friendship”: symmetry, support and secrecy. They also exist in male friendships, but Bayard Jackson says that women prioritize them. And, yes, she sees evidence of all three in the women’s bathroom.

Symmetry is the sense of sameness between women. “What is the most humanizing factor? You gotta go to the restroom. It has this flattening effect; it doesn’t matter what the other differences are, the unifier is being a woman.”

Next up is support, the No. 1 element that women look for in same-sex friendships. Duncan and Lawson certainly gave it to the girl they saved from a bad date, and Duncan has received it, albeit in a lesser crisis: “I have definitely been in the bathroom and other women have hyped me up when I’m insecure about my outfit,” she says. “You have your own personal hype-woman when you go into the bathroom.” And in The Hunting Wives, Akerman’s character asks for support (in the form of a pad) and Snow’s gets some in return (a place to hide from the party).

And finally, secrecy. It’s not so much literal secrets (though the Hunting Wives have plenty of them) as “the essence of it; we’re in this sacred place of disclosure and sharing,” within a female friendship, says Bayard Jackson. But it’s that essence that becomes literal in the bathroom, according to Duncan. “It sounds a little goofy … but it’s a sacred space: What happens in the girls’ bathroom stays in the girls’ bathroom,” says Duncan. It’s that rare place that’s both public and private, where we’re alone, but together, in a vulnerable state. “The bathroom is a physical representation, it’s a vault of secrets and quick whispers, and the sharing of yourself is literally the glue of women’s friendships,” says Bayard Jackson.