You and your best friend share everything together: secrets, laughs, broken hearts. There isn’t anything you could keep from her and she wouldn’t hesitate to say the same thing about you. People may start treating you as the same person because that’s how much time you two spend together. But until you start a friendship journal there are parts of each other's lives that will remain unknown, whether it is deliberate or not. So here are 6 reasons why you should start a friendship journal with your best friend.

There may be things you are afraid to share with each other. Sure you feel completely comfortable around one another, but there will always be something--big or small--that you may be afraid to bring up. It may be something about your friendship or simply something that affects one of you personally. Keeping a friendship journal is the perfect way to tackle this. When looking at two clean, blank pages of a journal you don’t feel any fear. You feel comfortable writing whatever may come into your mind. A journal could be what your friendship needs to make it just a little bit stronger.

You’ll always have a collection of memories to look back on. There is nothing better than reading through old journals. The small but important memories, that you otherwise had forgotten about, are there for you to experience all over again. People look on social media to remind them of their friendship milestones but reading about these milestones in a journal for yours and your friend’s eyes only is an experience of its own.

It’s the best way to keep a long-distance friendship alive. Keeping in contact with friends when you move to different areas can be difficult. Keeping up with their stories and experiences can become too time consuming with two busy schedules. There’s no better way to keep up with your friend’s life than through a friendship journal. You will still know every little detail of her life but this way you don’t have to plan every phone call.

It gives you both a chance to test your creativity. Writing in a journal can become straightforward after a couple weeks or a couple months. But when you make the commitment to keep this journal going between a friendship it will challenge you both to channel your inner-creativity to keep things interesting. This could be in the form of a drawing, diagram, bucket-list, etc.

For those times when one of you is too busy to answer the phone, it will be your friend for the hour. The older we get the busier we get, it’s inevitable. So for those days when your friend just can’t seem to get away from work or class, your friendship journal can be your ear for the day. You can still rant about a bad day and know that your friend will know every detail.

You will make everyone else jealous. People will envy the dedication you and your friend have to keep writing in your friendship journal. People will wonder why they didn’t think to start something so meaningful for their friendship.

While there are many things that you can do to strengthen your friendship, there’s nothing quite as special as starting a friendship journal. The benefits are endless and it makes the perfect, sentimental birthday present.