In Defense of the White Lotus Girlfriend Trio

Is this fucking play about us?

If you had this thought while watching the girls’ trip in season three of The White Lotus, I’m right there with you.

Until now, I’ve never really questioned the concept of a friend trio. Charlie’s Angels raised me. The Powerpuff Girls? Those are my animated sisters. So when season three of The White Lotus dropped, featuring a semi-toxic group of three blondes played by Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, and Leslie Bibb, I took a long, hard look at my own friendships.

And you know what? I’m not that concerned.

Maybe I should be: In less than a month, I’m going on a long-awaited girls’ trip with two of my besties since elementary school.

“Oopsie lol,” one of them DM’d after a Vogue piece warned against three-person girls’ trips, inspired by the show. I understand the argument: With a group of three, it’s easy to feel lonely or ganged up on in a two-against-one scenario, even when it’s something as simple as deciding where to eat dinner.

But I have a more optimistic view on three-person friendships—even after watching the latest White Lotus episode, and not just to convince myself ahead of my own trip (pinky swear).

Fabio Lovino/HBO

First, it must be said that the guests at the White Lotus are fictional characters. We all may feel like we’re a “Jaclyn,” a “Kate,” or a “Laurie”—or if we aren’t one ourselves, we know them—but the volume is turned up on their personas. The White Lotus isn’t just fiction, it’s satire.

What writer and producer Mike White does so well is take a real-life dynamic, add high heat and pressure, and skewer it. A girls’ trip of any size is the perfect subject for a roast. Gossip, eye rolls, politics (literal and social)—it’s all excellent fodder for the White Lotus treatment.

“I had this idea of three friends that are almost interchangeable at the beginning,” White told Glamour. “They’re all blondes. They all have this voluble, excitable energy. And then you start to see how they’re all just slightly different and the differences start to really unravel their time there together.”

And unravel they do. After sleeping with the guy the other is interested in (Jaclyn, to Laurie) to talking behind each other’s backs the moment the other steps out of the room (all of them), Laurie runs into the arms of Valentin’s friend in tonight’s episode both to get back at Jaclyn and to fulfill her own self-esteem deficit. They’re hanging on by a thread heading into the finale, right when they need each other most.

But one of the reasons this trio seems like a cautionary tale is that they’ve been sold to us as something they’re not. We’re told repeatedly that Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate are a group of old friends. Are they? They’ve known each other for years, sure, but they haven’t spent time together in decades—at least, not quality time.

As Jessica Radloff points out in her piece for Glamour, the relationship the women have is surface level, relying on superficial compliments and high school memories. As soon as that surface is cracked, things get messy. In most real friendships, you already know about—and hopefully, accept—each other’s messes. You know if your friend’s marriage is rocky, or if they were passed up for a promotion. You know if they probably (definitely) voted for Trump.

Monaghan distilled it nicely in a recent interview. “People can have longtime friendships, and just because you have a shared history doesn’t necessarily mean that you haven’t gone off and had different life experiences that inform your values or your choices and things like that,” she says, adding that there’s a “toxic positivity that exists specifically within this friend group.”

This doesn’t mean these women don’t love each other. But what they don’t seem to realize is that real friendship takes cultivating. It doesn’t materialize out of thin air, as they’re learning during their stay in Thailand.

Fabio Lovino/HBO

The brilliant Natasha Rothwell, who plays Belinda on the show, joined a recent episode of the podcast Las Culturistas With Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, and all this debate over the trio was a hot topic.

“I’m talking to some people who are like, ‘Oh, those women really hate each other.’ But then I’m like, I think they really love each other,” co-host Matt Rogers says. “I think they’re all really trying to connect with each other. Of course they have their own envies and jealousies, but I don’t think we’re watching three people that hate each other.”

Of course, those insecurities all hit a fever pitch during their night out with Valentin and his buddies. What could have brought them closer—dancing! Releasing their inhibitions! Feeling the rain on their skin!—turned sour purely because they don’t know how to communicate or read each other’s extremely obvious body language. When Laurie failed to seal the deal with Valentin despite pressure from Jaclyn, the latter took it upon herself to hook up with him herself. As we learn in the latest episode, the women are all repeating old patterns, straight from high school.

On Las Culturistas, Rothwell pointed to the unspoken feeling of regressing to your younger self when with old friends. “When you go back home for the holidays or whatever, you revert back to the person who knew you when,” she says. “So I think we’re seeing them in high school, in middle school, trying to behave with their actions instead of their words.”

To Rothwell’s point, I feel 12 years old again anytime I’m with my friends (complimentary). Not in the sense that we can’t talk to each other—in fact, quite the opposite. With your oldest friends, I’d argue your guards should be down, rather than up.

I would be remiss not to mention that the group was inspired, in part, by real-life “friends” White observed on vacation. “He was like, One person would leave and then the other two would start chatting. Why is it that women do that?” Monaghan says. “And I’m like, We are socially kind of conditioned to do that.” She may be right. But when you pick the right group of friends, you shouldn’t be worried that they’ll talk shit about you as soon as you’re out of earshot.

For the record, I’m not arguing that a group of three friends can’t be toxic. I just don’t think the White Lotus trio is the cautionary tale everyone says it is. If you feel like the show is holding a mirror up to you and your friend group—and I’m gonna hold your hand when I say this—there are larger forces at play. Because you know what else can be toxic? A group of two, four, five, or six. The number is just a contributing factor.

Three can be a crowd, but it can also be a party. I choose the latter.