I remember walking down 14^th street in Manhattan on a rather cold, rainy night to Veselka, a 24-hour diner in 2013. It was 3 am. I went armed with a copy of Topdog/Underdog, an insanely good play written by one of my favorite playwrights Suzan Lori-Parks. And I walked with no doubt in my mind for one thing: to see my friend Kris.

I have an unabashed, intense outpouring of love and care for the women who shape me everyday. I live for classic examples of female friendships on and off screen— Leslie and Ann from Parks & Rec are my favorite on screen female friendship while Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s camaraderie off screen is the stuff of dreams. I have multiple girlfriends that I connect with in so many different ways and with so many different fictional and non-fictional people; it’s surprising we don’t refer to each other by the characters we identify with.

But what I bank on most, beyond anything, is the knowledge that girls will stick up for each other. It’s easy to put catty girls up and create a narrative where it looks like all women do is fight and put each other down. It’s very simplistic to reduce female friendships down to binaries of they-get-together and they-don’t-get together, because it happens so often. It’s what men have made their money off of: making women fight with each other over them, as if conflict between women was just that easy.

What I thrive on, as a woman and as a human being, is for a specific veneer that surrounds female friendships: a veneer of unflinching, quiet support. I don’t find that with the friendships I share with men. No matter my level of closeness with any of my male friends, those friendships live on unwritten rules: never commit betrayal, always stick up for them and don’t expect the same because they’ll have the token, “But hey, I know you and you can do this yourself. You got this.” Perhaps I make men sound simplistic but really, I’m okay with that. Because my male friendships, despite their strength, barely ever bring me the kind of joy my girlfriends bring me.

They say women living in the same area have their periods sync. Female friendships are best explained by that phenomenon. It doesn’t matter that we did something to each other or to ourselves that pissed the other off so much that it can’t be forgiven— women come together eventually. The thing with female friendships is that those connections we build don’t necessarily go deep on all occasions. Female friendships, if you really take a hard look, live on the fight where women fight to be heard and to be seen. Compare the number of speeches that women have given that invoke inspiration for other women as opposed to those made by men. Take a look around the workplace and see the difference in tone and demeanor when a woman is spoken to, regardless of their position. Watch the streets and see how women walk when they’ve got their girlfriends with them as opposed to when they don’t. Notice the subtleties, the undertones of women’s conversations. They all speak the same language: of the silent, everyday fight, a language that unites and binds them.

I wrote an ode to my girls— all the brilliant women I have made friends with in this lifetime because I rarely ever take a moment to express how vital they are to me. They are the lifeblood of my interactions with the world, the source of my courage, the starting point of every new thing I’ve ever attempted in life. Of all the things in the world, including the fact that I require a man to make life, I don’t think I could breathe with joy without my girlfriends. It’s impossible to live without a heart and my girls make mine beat.