Although people often use Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to celebrate your nonromantic love for people like your siblings, friends, and parents, the term “Galentine’s Day” wasn’t popularized until its use by Leslie Knope in “Parks and Recreation”. Galentine’s Day is an opportunity to celebrate your female friendships and the rare bond associated with them and I am loving this concept. I have always been enthralled with the value and unique experience of female friendship and I couldn’t be happier that Leslie Knope helped to turn a tongue-in-cheek expression for single girls into a full day of acknowledgment and celebration.

This year is the first Galentine’s Day I will be spending at college and its occasion is frankly more momentous than any milestone birthday or national holiday. Not only because “friendships between college girls are grander and more dramatic than any romance” (in the words of Hannah Horvath) but also because I am also an attendant of a women’s college, where female friendship goes to thrive. While a lot of aspects about being a girl kind of suck (like systematic oppression) I feel lucky to be a girl in part because of the unique intimacy that I share with other girls, specifically close friends. This is also the first year that I have had a really close group of girl friends that I feel very secure and comfortable with, a “girl gang,” if you will. With Galentine’s Day approaching, and just because I enjoy steeping in my sentimentality, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much these bonds mean to me and have impacted me. While we show our friends that we love and appreciate them in small ways everyday, through triple texts and inside jokes, how often do we take the time to tell our girl friends all the reasons we love them? Probably not often enough. So, this is a love letter and an extended thank you note for my best friends on Galentine’s Day (and everyday).

Thank you for giving me the space to be myself, and for being yourselves with me. Thanks for holding my hand (and my hair), for Instagram caption workshopping, and three hour long transcontinental FaceTime calls. I love you for uplifting, inspiring, and empowering me. You are all so smart and so talented and beautiful and if you didn’t help me feel like I am too, I would probably feel criminally unworthy of being your friends. I love that you always take candid (or not so candid) photos of me and always tell me what I need to hear.

I can’t believe that I only get four years of living down the hall or in the same room as you and I promise not to take that for granted. I will soak in every night when you mess up my eyeliner because we can’t keep from dancing and when borrowed clothes and makeup are strewn about each other’s rooms in preparation for nights out. Speaking of, I love our entire ceremonious practice of “getting ready”. I will always remember spontaneous dorm room dance parties that end in 5 of us drenched in sweat, collapsed on one too-small twin size bed. I love holding your hands on walks to class, just to be close in August and to keep warm in the frigid February cold, as if we’re back in first grade on a play ground, not masquerading as adults. I love the rotating role of the “mom of the group” and the perennial youngest child. I love our wide array of nicknames for each other and that I can be really, really gross around you.

I can’t wait to pass down stories of karaoke nights in dive bars with X’s on our hands and surprise winter hikes. Speaking of hikes, thank you for climbing mountains with me, literal and figurative. I hope we never stop making a really big deal out of birthdays and that first-year fun becomes life-long traditions. I didn’t like snow until we got to play in it together, and I wouldn't want to ward off snow day cabin fever with anyone else. Thank you for teaching me how to salsa and (trying) to teach me how to ice skate and play video games. I love you for making me take risks and letting me push you to do the same. A good friend encourages you to take chances you’re afraid you’ll fail at. But I love you because you encourage me to take chances that I hadn’t even considered taking. You remember my strengths better than I do and are always there to remind me all that I’m capable of when I forget. Thank you for being my friend, and thank you for being you.