We live and die by the love and support of our girlfriends. This, of course, comes as no surprise and we are hardly the first (or millionth) people to wax poetic about the unnameable power and soul-nourishing necessity of having women in your orbit who really. get. you. Articles like "Girlfriends Are The New Husbands", "My Mom Has No Friends", "Why There’s Nothing in the World More Powerful Than Female Friendship", or "The Joys of Female Friendship" circle through our ridiculously named group text threads with the same frequency as links to stuff like this:
this:
or this:
*these are all literally just from the last month, shared by the ongoing life threads of ADOMANI HQ.
We think a lot about our girlfriends, especially now, when these recent seasons have altered us all on a seemingly elemental level, having revealed—indelibly and forever—that there is no greater gift than that of community, near or remote, of women who show up for us, who help us shoulder the weight of our collective sorrow, anger, fear, and joy, during calm seasons or riding the storm-tossed wilds of the past few years.
This isn't necessarily a love letter to one friend or to a specific squad, but more just a note bearing witness to the miraculous whole arc of possibility contained within the tapestry female friendships. We've all experienced the shifting, repositioning, and occasional fading of friendships due to time and circumstance...after all, the same people who religiously met for half price martinis every Thursday might not be the same people who would come early and leave late to help set up and break down a child's second birthday party and might not be the same people who would go with you to an Ikea straight from the airport because *it's just so close* (in fact, anyone who would do *that* has firmly achieved ride-or-die status and should be held on to closely, forever and ever).
When we were younger the shifting and "loss" of friendships made us deeply sad or, at least, questioning. A little bit of the iconic rhetorical "we couldn't help but wonder..."... what had we done to "lose" the friend? Did we mourn the person we were when that friendship reigned supreme? Whose "fault" was it that it ended? But those are the wrong questions.
It often comes down to this: who meets me where I need to be met and who can I be truly myself with? As our needs and requirements (and, to some extent, our essential selves) shift and grow throughout our lives, nourished in one direction or another by our choices, the calculus of who can meet us where we need to be met and who has the ability or the bandwidth to receive our authentic selves naturally changes. That in and of itself is its own kind of wonder. The truth is that the real power of female friendship is in the weave, the capacity for one precious human life (yours, ours) to encounter so many different people who can each wind the weight and beauty of their own thread with yours—even if only for a short time—so that the resulting tapestry of female friendship is woven through with infinite threads, rich beyond belief.
Maybe at some point we stop wondering or even clocking whether we're a Carrie or a Charlotte (or honestly, a Blanche or a Dorothy), and just start being grateful to know and love—and to have known and loved—so many different friends in so many different seasons. To have woven the tapestry so far and to wonder what threads may resurface in the weave or what the next unexpected color might be.
So to all the women who have ever shown up for us in this way—shown up for each other—and given us a soft place to land, a moment or a year or a lifetime of space to be the truest version of our best (or worst) selves—this is our love letter to you.
