What does Monica and Brandy’s meeting in “The Boy Is Mine” tell us about the fragility of female friendships

Last week, Ariana Grande threw a bit of nostalgia back into the top 100 hits by releasing a contemporary version of her 1998 hit “The Boy is Mine,” which featured the duo’s original vocalists Monica and Brandy. Taking a walk down memory lane, Monica revealed how working on the Grande project healed her decades-long rift with Brandy.

“The new collaboration process has largely bridged the gaps,” Monica said Entertainment tonight. “When you communicate properly, you can find not only solutions and solutions to problems, but sometimes it turns out that there were never any problems, only constant misunderstandings.”

Even though their duet topped the Billboard charts for nearly 13 weeks after its release, Monica and Brandy’s relationship was notoriously strained. Even before the release of their hit, the R&B singers consistently opposed one another in the media, a lot in order that Brandy originally suggested the idea of ​​a joint song to silence rumors of hatred amongst the creators at the time. Although they were reportedly friends and on the same level at the time of the single’s release, things took a turn for the worse shortly after when Monica reportedly broke up punched Brandy backstage at the 1998 MTV Music Video Awards.

Since then, the “So Gone” and “Right There” singers have occasionally thrown little jabs at one another on social media, and their interactions have been limited over the past twenty years. In 2020, the ’90s R&B icons shocked fans once they faced one another in a “Verzuz” battle that, in keeping with Monica, required lots of maturity.

“I wouldn’t call it anyone’s fault,” Monica said before the battle, per Entertainment tonight. “We all contributed to it and after some time it became a reality… It’s over. And it required a really adult conversation. There’s no shame in saying that.”

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Now, 4 years later, the singer credits Grande with further mending the rift between her and Brandy.

“The conversation itself made it much easier for me,” she added. “We decided the key was to maintain other people out of our relationship, each skilled and personal, and keep it between her and me, and that modified all the pieces. That completely modified the trajectory of the whole thing… My son was in the hospital in the future and she was the one I talked to while he was there – that is what Ariana did that he may not even realize.

Whatever the reason for his or her strained relationship, Brandy and Monica’s complex friendship reflects a broader phenomenon amongst women. In his book “Fighting for our friendships: the science and art of conflict and connection in women’s relationships”, writer Danielle Bayard Jackson explores the unique intricacies of female friendships.

“The way girls and boys come together and react to certain situations showed me our unique ways of bonding and resolving conflict,” Jackson said Psychology today. “Research suggests that ladies have higher expectations for support and intimacy in their close relationships than men. Women integrate friends into our lives as deeply as siblings, while men treat their friends more like cousins. With such high expectations, even minor conflicts can look like major violations. I do know I’m generalizing, but we often know that men aren’t as closely connected, so perhaps they do not see or hang around with one another as much (as women do).”

In addition to highlighting the differences between male and female relationships, Jackson emphasized the importance of conflict in friendship. Although most individuals view conflict in friendship negatively, the writer emphasizes that these moments are opportunities to grow and strengthen the bond – an idea echoed by Monica when talking about her friendship with Brandy.

“This time I thank God for growth and change, and for becoming a mother and experiencing a lot of what I have and learning to communicate properly,” Monica said, reflecting on the evolution of her relationship with Brandy. “We have lots of catching as much as do in terms of giving audiences what they really wanted from us back then. We didn’t discover a technique to do it then, but we’ll discover a technique to do it now.”