When I think about it – and I have thought about it – the reason I loved and can re-watch “Sex and The City” an obscene amount of times is because of the amazing way it showcased female friendships. Those women were there for each other. That was really the theme more than either sex or the city, and the writers of the show understood precisely how single women in their 30s need and rely on each other in both deep and shallow ways. (As an aside, this is why I truly do not get “Girls” – other than the fact that I am old. Those women don’t even seem to really like each other. Where’s the beauty in that?)

But the thing is, women and girls have always needed and relied on one another, as singleton 30somethings or not. Or at least I have. I never trust women who say they have “mostly male” friends. That’s some craziness.

As a teenager, I always had the group of friends I was actually myself with and not some “bitchy” or “I will make up lies about dates I’ve been on to sound sophisticated” version of myself that I may or may not have adopted to seem more secure than I was. I mean, hypothetically.

Then there was my raging feminist college self who made amazing friendships – ones I thought would last for the rest of my life. And some did, but not necessarily the ones I would have predicted then. We thought anyone who called us “girls” was sexist, we went everywhere in groups and somehow did not see a disconnect between our outspoken feminist rhetoric and the fact that most of our male friends and boyfriends were in (non-national) frats. We were women, you heard us roar, never mind any potential hypocrisy. For the record, at 44, I am a-ok with you calling me a girl. In fact, please do, unless you are a Republican.

In my 20s, I went to grad school and met the women I would go out with constantly for the next five years, almost without saying. It was more a matter of who was joining in the outings than whether we were doing anything at all (shout out to the gay men and one LJM who completed our awesome posse). We worshipped “Party Girl” because how could you not. We fancied ourselves hip even though we all lived on the Upper West Side and were in grad school and had to, like, study. We didn’t judge each other’s terrible decisions (there were a lot of those) and we knew what to say after each and every break up (and dear god, there were a lot of those too).

In my 30s, as my liver spoke up for itself, I found myself more grounded and less into going out five out of seven nights/week. I met my spouse as did many of my friends. But the men didn’t divide us or cause rifts; they eased us into a different level of friendship. This was the decade where – like the women on Sex and The City – I knew that the group of friends I had made over time was here to stay. These were the women who were there through cross-country moves, for the aforementioned break-ups, the babies, and through the worst of the worst, 9/11. I had my group and even though we didn’t all live in the same city, there were weddings and visits and the security of having known each other for a decade (or even two).

But now I’m in my 40s. I never expected to make new friends in my 40s, and I didn’t slash don’t have the energy or the drive to seek it out the way I did in college or grad school (okay, I may have stalked one or two people. Hi!). But I have made friends, and in some ways – in different ways – these friendships are even more powerful because they are a choice (none of us really needs new friends) and because our kids are involved and because they kind of took me by surprise.

Whether I’ve been friends with these amazing women for 40 years or just 4, every one these women in my life gets “it”. We all understand, appreciate and maybe even respect each other’s crazy. We know each other’s faults and have accepted them. We might be aging, but we still have fun together, youth be damned.

And then there’s the more serious stuff like sick or dying parents, spouses getting ill, life not working out exactly as our feminist, hot, hipster selves thought. And we all get that too. We toast it, we mourn it, we show up for it. Because we are girlfriends.

So thank you to all of you – you know who you are – for all the years of love in the past, and all the years of love to come.