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To Anna Faris, being a guys’ girl is overrated.
The actress, who split from husband Chris Pratt in August after eight years of marriage, opens up about the idea of considering husbands as best friends and emphasizes the importance of female friendship in an adapted essay from her new book, Unqualified, featured in Cosmopolitan‘s October issue.
“I was once told that I didn’t need a tight group of girlfriends because Chris should be my best friend,” Faris, 40, said. “But I never bought that. The idea of your mate being your best friend — it’s overhyped.”
Faris continued to say that the notion of having best friends, in general, is “messed up.”
“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,” she said. “And ranking your friends? It just shouldn’t happen, at least not beyond grade school.”
Among Faris’ handful of women that she now lists as confidantes is her Mom costar Allison Janney and hometown friends — but she didn’t always recognize the importance of her female relationships.
“In my 20s, I thought it was cool to say I was a guys’ girl,” she said. “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.”
She added: “I was selling my own gender down the river, and I wasn’t even getting any fulfillment from the relationships with those dudes.”
Faris said that part of the reason why it took her longer to cultivate female friendships was interactions she had with “mean girls” growing up who would taunt her by snapping her bra straps and by writing obscenities on her locker.
“It takes vulnerability of spirit to open yourself up to other women in a way that isn’t competitive,” she said. “That’s especially hard in Hollywood, where competition is built into almost every interaction.”
Unqualified is set to hit shelves in October, and the memoir will share more intimate details about Faris’ life and relationship with Pratt.
“It’s just my experiences,” she said of the project recently on her podcast of the same name. “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.”
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE
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