Recently, I have been binge watching the TV show, "Friends" Which is about a group of friends, set in the 90's, who live and work in New York City. On September 22, 1994, the day the world became a better place. Even though some of were too young to know it at the time. On that day, the show that has defined how we look at friendship, relationships, and coffee shops premiered;“Friends.” Although we are not spending our twenties in a giant, rented apartment in New York City, “Friends” provides some of the greatest lessons for life during this complicated period. One of the many lessons brought up in the show, are one of the many reasons why I love it very much.

You could say that I have a deep connection with Friends — one that can only be achieved from serious repetition. From watching it late at night and when I'm doing homework. It is basically my go-to source of entertainment and laughter in high school and now college It makes me laugh until my stomach hurts, and cheers me up after bad days. Without fail, every episode took me back to the first time I watched it, and filled me with a sense of calm and it still does.

If you’re a Friends fan, there’s a natural tendency to quote the show in everyday conversation, regardless of your age or when you started watching it. I quote it so much that it drives my own friends crazy. It is basically like having inside jokes with yourself. Fans adopted phrases like “Oh my god!" and “It’s Pors-cha!” long before Tumblr existed and was quoted constantly. The writing on Friends speaks for itself, and never relied on the internet to surface its best moments; that simply wasn’t an option. I can't count how many times I have had a guy use the "How you doing?" pickup line that Joey uses, or my running has been compared to Phoebe's. Friends is a very huge part of pop culture and will be for a long time.

The thing that kind of sticks out to me are the differences between twenty-somethings in the 90s and twenty-somethings today are obvious. You couldn’t land a date just by swiping right, couldn’t make plans on the fly like we do now. And there is still a general sense that things were simpler. It is a fascinating peek at what life was like not all that long ago, and a testament to how much has changed. I think people love Friends because it’s real, but also because it’s not too real. No matter what, it always remains lighthearted and funny; even the darkest of major life events are punctuated with a laugh. That’s what a sitcom is supposed to be: a slightly exaggerated version of everyday life that reflects a little part of yourself back to you.

To this day, I still feel pangs of loneliness and some sadness when I watch “The Last One.” It fills me with the same sadness you feel on the last day of summer camp. To that same end, I also feel a rush of excitement and curiosity when I immediately follow up with “The Pilot.” It resets me, and I’m comforted to know that there are, once again, so many episodes and adventures ahead, even though I have seen every episode at least 8 times. You can tell me that Friends seems outdated because of its laugh track or that it would never have run for 10 seasons in today’s world. You’re right, but I’m simply not interested in your opinion that those things make Friends a bad 90s sitcom. At its core, Friends is a show about relationships — platonic, caring, romantic — and that’s the concept that pulls in generations also pulls in new audiences. The thing that I and so many other people love so much about the show is right there in the theme song: “I’ll be there for you, ‘cause you’re there for me too.”