Lena Dunham Just Dropped Some Super Real Midlife Friendship Advice

Lena Dunham just turned 40, and so far, she’s a big fan of this new era of adulthood.

“It kinda rules,” she told Amy Poehler during a recent appearance on the SNL alum’s highly entertaining podcast, Good Hang.

Dunham, who was there in support of her new memoir, Famesick, told Poehler that one of the things she’s embracing at 40 is the constitutional inability to engage in friendship drama—including those overwrought texts and emails that contain a surplus of hurt feelings and imagined slights that can make friendships in your 20s and 30s feel like an extended couple’s therapy session.

“I haven’t had to exchange a really heavy email in a while,” she tells Poehler.

“I remember once having a fight with a girlfriend in my 20s,” she tells Poehler by way of example, “and we were going back and forth on these long, point-to-point” emails.

Dunham calls these exchanges "creative writing" exercises that usually resolve in tears and apologies and retractions—in other words, with both parties realizing none of this drama was necessary.

“Now if someone raises points with me, I will not be addressing those points,” she says. “I’m not a lawyer. I’m not going to make notes on your Docusign and send it back to you.”

It’s solid get-on-with-it-girl advice that will land hard for many women who are also engaged in the blessed act of midife counter programming their intimacy and relationships, a.k.a. growing up and out of bad habits that make everyone miserable.

Who among us hasn’t pulled our hair out trying to force a friend into submitting to our view of how they’ve treated us (or how we feel treated) or had to spend hours or days or even weeks trying to explain to a friend that we didn’t really do or say what they thought we did (or maybe we did, and we're sorry)—only to burst into tears, apologize and then start the entire cycle all over again?

Friendships are the seed and soil in which we grow throughout our lives—but by god, care of the land and its fruits demands not just feeding, but pruning to survive, too.

Poehler gets the rich intensity of female friendship—the things we love and the things that can drive us crazy—and both women land on the bliss that can be midlife friendship in which there’s tacit agreement that not every single slight needs to be litigated like a human rights claim.

Say less, says Poehler.

Say less, echoes Dunham.

And if you can’t always say less, do yourself (and your pal) a favour—don’t put it in writing.