Call it a midlife crisis, a bid to recapture my youth—but the bygone thing I’ve been chasing isn’t a taut neck or glass skin, but a good old-fashioned sleepover with my girlfriends.
Girls’ nights out have started to feel like speed dating, with everything set on a timer: the restaurant reservation, the babysitter, a middle-aged woman’s ever-diminishing tolerance for noise. “Ladies’ Nights,” as they were known at their late-20th century inception (shout-out to Kool The Gang), weren’t even designed to satisfy women’s desires. A discounted drink to increase female patronage on a slow night was just bait—to lure male patrons willing to pay full price.
That’s not to say that girls’ nights in haven’t fallen prey to late-stage capitalism. A cursory Google search of “adult sleepovers” will take you down a TikTok rabbit hole to a yassified version of your childhood slumber party, replete with matching satin pajama sets, balloon arches, and personally-branded Prosecco. And, because it’s TikTok, group dances!
Performing TikTok choreo in matching pajamas is about as appealing as getting my annual mammogram. What I want more than anything these days is time. My girlhood sleepovers offered time in excess. When my sixth-grade bestie Denise swore during one slumber party séance that she saw my name flicker in the candlelight—which meant, as she explained it, that I would die that night—daybreak couldn’t have come soon enough. (The only thing that failed to survive was my friendship with Denise.)
I set out to schedule some low-key sleepovers across the two weekends a month when my kids were with their dad (which, admittedly, is one of the main reasons I could even consider this social experiment, as I have a house to myself every other week). But I lost one weekend to COVID and suddenly found myself cramming three sleepovers into the span of five nights in order to meet my deadline.
To ready myself for this five-night deep dive, I consulted a local expert: my 12-year-old daughter. In the few years since she’d started having sleepovers, she had tried every version, from full-blown, stay-up-all-night slumber parties to intimate one-on-ones; overnights with only boys (except her), only girls, and a mix of all genders.
So, what was the key to a successful sleepover, in her seasoned opinion?
“Snacks,” she told me, flatly. “You’re going to need snacks and sooo many drinks.” She also revealed the number-one rookie mistake: pulling up in an outfit. “What you actually want is to come in the most comfortable, beat-up shit you own.” (Matching pajama sets, be damned!)
Danisha, the deputy director of a nonprofit supporting Black and Latine children in private schools, arrived for the first sleepover around nine on a Friday night. We’ve been close for a decade, since her son and my daughter became fast friends in preschool, bonded by their love of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and roughhousing. She’d spent the afternoon and the better part of the evening at her son’s sports-doubleheader (first, flag football at school, then YMCA basketball), with both games going into overtime. During game two, she learned her childcare fell through, and with her husband out of town on a boys’ trip, she had a choice: cancel our sleepover or leave her son, now 13, alone overnight for the first time.
“I was determined to get here, but it was a lot,” she said, hot pink pajamas and Prosecco in tow. (Her son ended up insisting on staying home alone, eager for a taste of independence.) For an adult with a full slate of responsibilities—kids, partners, aging parents, property taxes—having a sleepover at the end of a work week actually bordered on a bad idea. I hadn’t had time to go to the store, so my snack game was a bust. I even took a nap before Danisha came over to ensure I could make it to midnight.
I had more time to prepare before Kristin and Sara showed up the next evening, while their boys were having their own sleepover at Sara’s on her husband’s watch. In this mom group, Sara, the founder of an award-winning music supervision company, is the only one still married to the father of her children.
“He’s clocked that,” Sara said of her husband of 18 years, as she, Kristin, and I gathered around my dining table and the charcuterie board I’d assembled. Sara noted that her husband tended to be on his best behavior around us divorced moms, presumably so Sara wouldn’t be tempted to cross over to the “dark side.”
Some men have a hard time wrapping their heads around the depth of female friendships, most likely because many of them don’t experience the equivalent with other men. “Boy’s trips,” like the one Danisha’s husband went on during our sleepover—or any other male friendship-maintenance, for that matter—happen far less frequently than they do for their female counterparts. A 2021 study conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that 15% of American men had no close friends whatsoever, in part because men find it harder to forge emotional connections.
“I can be vulnerable and honest with my female friends,” said Danisha, who lost her mother earlier in the year and feels like she hasn’t yet begun to process her grief. “My guy friends don t want to hear that I’m sad, you know?”
And then there was my boyfriend, who kept cracking jokes that these sleepovers were actually some secret Sapphic ruse (which became so irritating, it was the subject of our last couples therapy session). Although Kristin, an interior designer who identifies as queer, did point out that prioritizing friendship was, in fact, kind of gay.
“Because fewer people are in committed relationships, a lot of people in the queer community have already been living with their best friends or in platonic situations for a long time,” she said, dressed in a Rage Against the Machine tee and shorts, her tiny frame engulfed by the oversized safari chair in my living room.
The third and final sleepover took place on a weeknight and was only made possible by the clear (and enviable) division of labor Diana, my friend of 20 years, has with her husband. Their daily routine consisted of her husband, who is also her business partner at their production company, working the morning shift with their girls, ages three and six, while Diana supervised bedtimes. Feeling that pinch of mom guilt nonetheless, Diana put extra care into the hours she spent with her daughters before she left their Pasadena bungalow.
“Usually we all eat together, but I made dinner just for them. I got them into the bath, set out their pajamas, and set out their clothes for tomorrow. So we would end the day on a super happy note,” she said, “I bought them both princess dresses.”
Something like ending your children’s day on a happy note sounds simple, but the toll it can take on the person orchestrating that happiness was apparent by the time Diana made it across town to my house.
“I forgot what it was like up in these hills,” she shouted, emphasizing the last word like an epithet, three overnight bags hanging off of one arm. A bottle of sake and a dinner of Katsu-ya takeout later, Diana’s shoulders started to come down from around her ears.
For the amount of preparation necessary to organize these sleepovers—both for me and my guests—the boon of staying in was in how little we had to do once the night was underway. We planted ourselves on my three-and-a-half-foot-deep sofa that repels daytime visitors because it basically forces you to lie down. We popped Champagne, opened wine, and poured sake—drinking far less than we would have going out—and ordered in through Uber Eats. We slapped K-beauty masks on our faces and sticky patches to the soles of our feet that promised to draw out all of our toxins. We talked about loss and grief and family estrangement, old heartbreak that looked funny in hindsight—Kristin’s first serious girlfriend left her for a mortician—and topics of absolutely no consequence, like which nepo babies we didn’t hate for being nepo babies (Jamie Lee Curtis, for one). We talked and talked and talked, until we turned in far earlier than we ever would have as our younger selves. And in the morning, everyone made their own beds without having to be asked. We could be carefree girls for a night, but we were grown women, after all.