As a rom-com-obsessed teenager, all I wanted was a boyfriend. Not to post or brag about to my single friends, but to divulge all of the secrets I never told anyone else. This was love and intimacy. These experiences were only meant for romantic partners. 

That’s how it was in the movies. Your friends helped motivate you to get the guy you longed for, and then that person became the focus of your attention. Your connection with them was stronger than any you’d ever known, and your friends remained in the background ready to catch you when things fell apart. So, I waited to find this person. And I waited. And oh! Just kidding — I’m still waiting.

During this indefinite period, despite my best efforts to keep everyone out, I learned that love isn’t reserved for boyfriends. It’s not meant to be locked up for one person with the key. It is meant to be infused into every relationship you cultivate and displayed to the people who make weekdays more than just a vehicle to the weekend and make you laugh when it feels like everything else is going wrong. Love is meant for friends, and it is fostered through intimacy.

A few weeks ago as my 20th birthday came to a close, I sat in my apartment with my closest friends listening to music — the best way to spend a night, if you ask me. I requested one thing — “Tell me your deepest secrets.” This question was not a surprise to them, but they still tried their best to resist my attempts to therapize them and make them express their emotions — how dare I?! After a little bit of coercion along the lines of, “It’s my birthday, you have to,” they gave in. 

We shared our fears and our confusion about how to overcome them, if that’s even possible. We gasped at stories of life before we knew each other until we were too tired to keep talking. This is intimacy. It’s sitting squished together on a university-issued couch without a worry about how greasy your hair is or whether or not your part-snort-part-wheeze laugh will make them embarrassed to be around you. 

Sure, this closeness will exist in a romantic relationship, but experiencing it with friends is just as important. In college, the friends you make become your family, and if you can’t open up with them or be comfortable letting them see you at your worst, life can get extremely lonely.

College is exhausting at times, and if you have to carry the weight of navigating school, your future career and existing on the cusp of adulthood alone, it could break you down. Don’t even get me started on the stress of the emotional chess game that is snapping a man you want to date, who will likely never ask you out. 

Chances are, during this period, you’re going to crash out over nothing and live in a cycle of questioning everything — from box-dyeing your hair to completely changing your career path. The beautiful part of this absolute mess is your friends are going through the same thing, so let them in. 

Intimacy is being seen for all that you are — the weird impressions you do when telling a story, the lethal food combinations that you discovered as a child and refuse to abandon and the off-key singing you inadvertently do while cooking dinner. It is also your obsessive people-pleasing and how anxious you get before every trip home. These habits aren’t meant to be hidden from the people in your life but shared to bring you closer to them and yourself.

I have found by forming intimate connections with friends, you don’t just learn to accept love from others but from yourself. If you can’t sit alone doing nothing without beating yourself up, it’s not going to be any different to sit and do nothing with another person. Gentleness from the people you admire most will help you practice being gentle with yourself. 

I think most people would agree that sex complicates relationships. Learning how to build deep connections with your friends prepares you to form that bond with the people that make you want to spill your guts and give you butterflies all at once, without having to navigate the intricacies of whether or not you should stay for breakfast. 

While reading Dolly Alderton’s memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” which I recommend to any girl who falls victim to doing things “just for the plot,” I was forced to face the truth that no matter how hard we try to deny it, after we leave college, everything will change. Friends will move, couples will fall in and out of love, people will get married and pregnant and grow up. The one thing that will stay the same is the love you have for those people and how it permeates into every memory you made with them.

So, hold your friends tight and tell them you love them. Drunkenly spill your guts about how they are one of the most amazing people you know, then walk home hand-in-hand giggling about the stupid things you did because life will not always be like this. Cherish platonic intimacy as much as you can now because one day you’ll be sitting with your own family, remembering the one you had when you were 20.

Julianna Steach is interested in topics regarding human rights, feminism, mental health and queer culture. Email her at [email protected].