The 'Mom' actress explains in an excerpt of her book, 'I really believe that your partner serves one purpose and each friend serves another.'
- Sep 7, 2017
AceShowbiz - Following her separation from husband Chris Pratt, Anna Faris admits she's not keen with the idea that you should be best friends with your partner. In an excerpt of her upcoming book that she shares on Cosmopolitan, she says that "the idea of your mate being your best friend - it's overhyped."
"In my 20s, I thought it was cool to say I was a guys' girl. I didn't realize until later how lame I sounded, bragging as though having a lot of girlfriends was a bad thing. Back then, I thought that having the approval of my stoner guy friends was of greater value than having the approval of beautiful blonde sorority girls, so I touted my male friends as if my association with them spoke to how cool I really was. I was selling my own gender down the river, and I wasn't even getting any fulfillment from the relationships with those dudes."
"I was once told that I didn't need a tight group of girlfriends because Chris should be my best friend. But I never bought that," she continues. "I really believe that your partner serves one purpose and each friend serves another. There's the friend you confess things to and the friend with whom you do the listening. Or this is the person I talk to when I'm feeling lonely and sad, this is the person I talk to about work s**t, and this is the friend I'm still in touch with because we grew up together."
"Today, I'm lucky to have a handful of women I count as confidantes," she says, naming her "Mom" co-star Allison Janney among them. "It takes vulnerability of spirit to open yourself up to other women in a way that isn't competitive," she explains, "and that's especially hard in Hollywood, where competition is built into almost every interaction."
She adds, "To be honest, I think the notion of best friends in general is messed up though. It puts so much pressure on any one person, when I truly believe it's okay to have intimacy with different people in different ways. And ranking your friends? It just shouldn’t happen, at least not beyond grade school."
Anna Faris wrote the book while she was still with Chris Pratt. The actor even wrote foreword for the book. Now that they split, she admits she's dreading the book's release. "I feel really, really nervous because it feels really intimate," she says on her podcast. "I would love it so much if you picked up my book. But please know, I am so scared. I feel like leaving the country for a while. I'm breaking into a sweat as we talk about it."
"I'm excited. When I first got the book deal I thought, 'Oh, what a great adventure.' Now that it's getting closer, I feel, in a sense, that I got to always hide behind characters, and now this is me and it feels a little scary," she continues. "It's just my experiences. It's just sort of how I felt as a really quiet kid with headgear and then suddenly being an actress in L.A. Basically how I haven't felt comfortable in my own skin."
