When you go to college in the south, there is a seemingly conventional adherence to the tradition of acquiring a boyfriend who will go on to become your fiancé shortly after (or before) you acquire your degree. Engagement coinciding with graduation as a common circumstance is something that came as a shock to me, most likely because where I am from, “young” married couples are typically in their late 20s and even early 30s, not fresh-faced graduates just newly legal to drink. And I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that at all; my parents got married at 22 because like many other couples who choose to marry young, they had been dating since they were essentially in the womb. I think it’s wonderful and amazing if you stumble upon the person you’re meant to be with at such an early stage in your life, and you’re completely at peace with ceasing to search and experience being with others simply because you know you’d be more than content for the rest of your life with this other soul. But if you’re not my parents, or the girl in your sorority whose Facebook pictures you stalk because she just had the most perfect engagement and has been dating her fiance since 2006—in other words, if you’re amongst the majority of girls, like myself, who have experienced a string of harrowing heartbreaks and the extreme highs and lowest of emotional lows of teenage relationships—and you feel like you’re missing something by not having a steady boyfriend whom you can envision a bright future with, let me tell you something: You’re not.

A boyfriend provides you with a layer of comfort so that you know no matter what happens, whether you failed a test, fought with your roommate, or had a tough day at work, you have something and someone to lean on. You have someone to make it all better, someone to tell you warm, sweet things that cause your spirits to lift. Relationships simultaneously provide you with a sense of purpose, a feeling of fulfillment fueled by making another person happy. Throughout high school and the beginning of college, I spent so much of my time consumed by fulfilling the purpose of making someone else happy. I’ve written innumerable letters, planned countless date nights, meticulously carried out surprises and pored over coming up with ways to display my affection—ways to make the other person smile when they were struggling, ways to make them feel important, ways to defuse imminent arguments or to prove my love and loyalty. Just as it was comforting for me to be someone’s person, it was so comforting to have a person. Yet I’d knew there’d be a time and place to rip myself from such a comfort and take on the world by myself, whether it was my choice or not, and what I quickly realized was that college is one of the most opportune and fortunate times to experience heartbreak and being single for the first time in a long time—especially if you are lucky enough to have friends like mine.

Let me give you some background on my friends—the friends I’ve had since we were all brace-faced, pimply high school freshmen and the friends I’ve made since college. Some of them have been there through it all; we got to share our first-kiss adventures around the same time, our first proms, our first high school boyfriends, the first broken heart that left us feeling like we literally could not breathe because it hurt so badly. Together we developed and grew and continued to grow a support system that was secure enough to catch us from any fall, no matter how far we fell. Somehow, I was lucky enough to find this again as I moved forward into the next chapter in my life, college. I always knew I was lucky to have the ride-or-die best friends I made in high school, yet I didn’t fully realize the degree to how fortunate I was to have such a support system until I found the same thing when I ventured 17 hours from my sleepy, stagnant hometown and dove headfirst into an entirely new world, and until heartbreak became a thing once again in my life. When you have people who are always on your side, who will always seek to comfort you when they know you are unhappy, who will be there to talk you out of the dark place you’re in until tears stop rolling and you’re laughing at how ugly you look but neither of you care, that’s when you realize that having people is so much more important than having a person. My best friends are my people, and they’ve made me come to the realization that boys and boyfriends, while they can be fun, aren’t all that important at this age.

The most important thing at this stage in our lives is figuring out what we truly want for ourselves, who we are as individuals, and what we wish to accomplish and experience, completely and utterly separate from the wants and needs of someone else who could potentially be holding you back from the things you really want out of your four short years and beyond. It is the absolute best time to focus on yourself and your friends, because at this stage in life and until the end of time they are your soulmates—soulmates that you do not need to feel an immense pressure to be perfect for, to do everything right and never make mistakes. They are the people who will admit you messed up but they won’t ever see it as an exit; they’ll stand by your side without judgement and help you to move forward. They will help you to discover your best qualities and look past your imperfections. When a boy gives up on you, they never will. When he tells you that you're not worth the effort, they will always go out of their way to show you that you are. They’ll reassure you that you are more than good enough, you are enough regardless of what he led you to believe, always and always. At this age, when we are just getting our bearings on life and our heads and hearts are a chaotic mess and we constantly feel like we’re falling apart, all we can ask for are people who we can count on to lift us up, and never tear us down like volatile romantic relationships often do at this age—and that’s why I can fully endorse Carrie when in "Sex and the City" she quotes the famous line so many girls have used as an Instagram caption over the years: “Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with.”

I hope that, like me, you have friends whom you feel so strongly are your people, your soulmates. When heartbreak rears its ugly head in your direction, I hope that you too have such incredible people to fall back upon and help to show you the light, people who show you that cracks are how the light seeps in. The light being the fact that you will be 100 percent, completely OK being single for awhile, if not a long time, in college. And hey, I honestly wouldn’t mind just living with my best friends in a sweet apartment in New York City with a few cats and perpetual wine nights for the rest of my life if that’s what it comes down to in the end. You will always feel a twinge of jealously at the girls who seem to have the perfect relationships and who go on to have the perfect engagement album on Facebook at such a young age and look like they have it completely together tied with a perfect ribbon, but this doesn’t mean you’re missing anything. Life is a grand adventure and the bottom line is that you don’t need a relationship to be able to live it to the fullest.

Shout-out to my people—you know who you are.

xoxo