Soul · Essay

The Oldest Alliance

By Teona Abuladze 5 min read July 28, 2026

They taught us to compete because they are afraid of what we are together.

By [Teona Abuladze] · 8 min read

You learned it young, before you had words for it: that the girl across the room was competition. That there was one seat, one crown, one man worth having, one acceptable kind of pretty — and she might get there first. Nobody sat you down and said it. It came in through the water: the magazine covers pitting one woman against another, the aunt who asked why you couldn’t be more like your cousin, the whole culture’s quiet insistence that women are, above all, each other’s rivals.

It is the oldest trick there is. And it is a trick. Let’s take it apart.

Divide, and rule

Any power that wants to keep a group down has always known the same secret: keep them fighting each other, and they will never turn on you. A house divided cannot organise. A woman busy competing with the woman beside her is not looking up at the thing that arranged them both on the same narrow ledge.

So we were set against one another, deliberately and from the start — taught to read other women as threats, to measure ourselves against them, to want their downfall a little. Internalised misogyny isn’t a personal defect; it’s an installation. The comparison that runs automatically when another woman walks in beautiful. The small, ugly flush of satisfaction when one we envy stumbles. The old “I’m not like other girls,” as though being unlike women were a compliment rather than a wound. None of that is your nature. It’s your training. And training can be undone.

What they are actually afraid of

Ask why the conditioning is so relentless, and you arrive somewhere clarifying: nobody works this hard to divide something they don’t fear.

We are pitted against each other because a woman alone is manageable, and women together are not. Every shift that ever changed a woman’s life — the vote, the wage, the right to her own body and her own bank account — arrived when women stopped competing long enough to stand in a line together. That line is precisely what the trick exists to prevent. The rivalry drilled into us was never proof that we’re catty by nature. It’s proof that our unity is dangerous enough to be worth sabotaging.

The one who actually shows up

And here is what the whole apparatus is working to keep you from noticing. When it truly comes apart — the diagnosis, the divorce, the baby, the grief, the 3 a.m. of it — who understands without translation? Who offers the specific, wordless recognition of someone who has bled the same way, feared the same things, been underestimated in the same rooms?

A woman. Nearly always, a woman.

This isn’t sentiment; it turns out to be biology. When researchers finally studied women’s stress response instead of only men’s, they found we aren’t built solely to fight or flee — we’re built to tend and befriend, to turn toward each other and form protective alliances under threat. It’s an evolved survival system, run on oxytocin, far older than any structure now trying to override it. And it works: women with strong friendships live measurably longer, recover faster, carry less depression, and take less bodily damage from stress. One of the longest studies ever run on human lives concluded that the quality of our relationships predicts health and longevity better than wealth or cholesterol. Chronic isolation, by contrast, wears the body down at a rate some scientists compare to smoking.

Read that plainly: reaching for each other is not our weakness. It is, quite literally, how we were built to survive. The shoulder she offers is keeping you alive.

Choose her

So the radical act — the genuinely subversive one — is refusing the setup.

It’s the compliment paid out loud instead of the comparison swallowed. The reference passed on, the door held, the name spoken warmly in the room she isn’t in. It’s deciding that the woman ahead of you is proof it can be done, not proof there’s no room left. It’s meeting the younger one coming up behind you with a hand instead of an elbow. Every time we choose solidarity over rivalry, we take back a piece of power that was stolen precisely by keeping us apart.

None of this asks us to pretend women are saints, or that we have never wounded each other — we have, sometimes deeply, and honesty means saying so. But it’s worth knowing whose interests that wounding has always served. They were never ours.