I’m sure unhealthy emotional dependency has occurred in many women’s relationships over the years, among married and single women alike.

Generating wacky solutions to unmet emotional needs is common. Actually, one friend and I were just laughing today about neediness. Hers, she said, has been shrinking. “I’ve gone from being a Hoover vacuum cleaner making that loud sucking sound to just being well…” and, picking up her soda, she sucked through the straw, “… something like this.” We both laughed. It’s good when we can get our needs in the light and laugh about them.

Nevertheless, the abundance of single (or single longer) women in our culture seems to create a climate ripe for emotional confusion. And without a making a gigantic leap, it’s not hard to imagine that in a society where sexual connection in any context, at any cost, has become a god, emotional dependence, especially if it is lodged in connection with one friend, can sexualize among women. I’ve even seen this among those who decidedly believe the sexualization of female friendships is wrong. …

So much of this has this heavy, shadowy feel. It makes me not even want to talk about it. But I can’t escape the notion that naming the truth, bringing it out into the light, is a key to re-forging a path for girls to love girls well. None of this mess shocks God – the darkness isn’t dark to him. So while there’s no need to dwell on every detail of what’s shady, we don’t need to fear getting slimed just because we talk candidly about the truth. …

Author/minister John Piper uses this metaphor: When God is not the center of our “planets of passion,” when we make anyone or anything else the sun in our universe so to speak – inevitably, our planets of passion will spin out of order.  Our understanding of and desire for “connection” can get twisted.  Or, as C.S. Lewis puts it in his book, "The Four Loves,"

Affection produces happiness if – and only if – there is common sense and give and take and ‘decency.’…There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be. That is the whole point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection will “go bad on us”²⁸ (emphasis mine).

Maybe all of this is why the first two of the Ten Commandments are these: "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”²⁹ God wants to protect us from affection gone bad. And the antidote is to keep him, the Source of “a far higher sort of love,” central in every single relationship, including our closest girlfriends.