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About 24 hours ago, we went viral on Instagram with a useful flow chart about how to tell if you’re a señora versus a señorita. It really went around the world and back, now nearing 1M views!
We noticed something unusual in the comments. When you go viral, you’ll start to get pretty mean comments. But in this post, commenters were talking to each other, joking, poking fun at themselves about becoming a señora. It was the most positive comment section we’ve ever seen.
So why did 50,000 women share the meme with their friends and why were they having so much fun?
It’s because of the power of the comadre.
To have a happy, healthy life, ladies in their señora eras need to have a comadre. Someone you can talk to about nothing, send memes to, and joke around with.
Many of us think that we don’t need any of that, and that partner/husband is our best friend. However, according to author Rhaina Cohen, this isn’t necessarily the healthiest arrangement. In her book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, she argues that we can build more meaningful lives by prioritizing our friendships outside the home instead of pouring everything into our partners.
Go back a few generations in Latin America, and you’ll find that it was far more common for women to keep their deepest friendships with their girlfriends rather than expecting one person — a husband/partner — to be confidant, best friend, and spouse all at once. But today you go to a wedding and hear that the bride and groom are also “each other’s best friend.” That sounds lovely, and I’m sure many really mean that. But it’s largely a modern invention.
In Latin America, non-romantic friendships carry a weight they often don’t here. There’s even a name for it: capital social (read that in Spanish), and there are social and even physical benefits. Research shows these friendships have been tied to better economic outcomes, moving up at work, healthier habits, and better living conditions as we age. Friendship, in other words, isn’t a luxury you get to after the real work of life. It is the real work.
Take me, for example. I am a regular Scrooge, and hate leaving my house and I loathe traveling. But after being forced to socialize – at an elementary school birthday party, or a baby shower for example – I feel refreshed, energized and joyful. Don’t you?
It’s because we are built to have comadres
In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning that this country is living through an epidemic of loneliness and disconnection. Even before the pandemic, about half of American adults were already experiencing it. In fact, the risk that chronic loneliness poses to your lifespan has been compared to smoking. Having close social ties has even been shown to lower stress hormones like cortisol.
The most famous long-term study on happiness ever conducted — the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed people for decades — landed on one conclusion above all others: relationships are the one thing that makes us happy and keeps us well. We should all be practicing “social fitness” with the same seriousness we bring to the gym.
Those of us who immigrated here understand this a little more. When you arrive in a new country, your ties to the homeland are cut, and you’re suddenly without the village that used to hold you up. That’s the moment you learn exactly how much harder life is without your people.
What we lost, and what they had
Ask anyone older in your family what it was like growing up back home — or in close-knit Hispanic communities of Miami, Los Angeles, Nueva York, or Texas. They’ll tell you their family was their community, and beyond that, they had the whole neighborhood to lean on. Dozens of cousins who doubled as best friends. Knowing every family on the block by name and by story. The chisme flowed like wine and was practically a hobby. When something went wrong and someone was in trouble, the entire family showed up at the door.
Go back further, to your great-grandmother’s time, and there were gathering places everywhere: the central plazas in Mexico, the Casas de Cultura across Latin America, misa on Sunday followed by a long lunch surrounded by everyone you loved. The Blue Zones researchers found the same pattern in the longest-living communities on earth — Okinawa has a word for it, moai, a small group bound together for mutual support. (Fitting that the moái of Chile’s Rapa Nui are statues of the ancestors — a community that outlasts death itself.)
In Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, centenarians turned out to have strong social ties and a deep sense of belonging. They didn’t know they were doing it for their health. They just did it.
And then, over the last fifty years (in the United States in particular) so much of it quietly disappeared — lost to mobility, commuting, screens, and a slow cultural drift toward privacy over connection. By 2016, only about 20 percent of Americans spent any real time with their neighbors, and a third never spoke to them at all.
Sit with that for a moment. We built lives where you pay to belong to something: the HOA clubhouse, the gym, the Pilates studio. Lots of acquaintances and “party friends,” but very few people who actually come to your house. If you have that, you’re very lucky and an exception to the norm.
Enter the comadre
The word literally means co-mother. Traditionally she was the godmother of your children — chosen in the rite of compadrazgo as almost a third parent, bound to your family through good and bad, especially in times of stress. Over time, comadre came to mean something broader: the close friend you tell everything to, the one who is simply always there.
This is the tradition worth reviving, and you don’t need permission or a baptism to start.