I Love Men, But Nobody Can Replace my Girls.

The biggest mistake that women make in relationships, is that they try to get their man to act like one of their girls.

Not only does this go against the fundamental grain of who men are at their cores (they are not designed to act like, speak like, or hold space like women), but it also represents the fundamental importance of having strong, female friendships. Too often, I hear women complain about the way that their man meets them emotionally. When they’re upset, he offers practical solutions. When something is wrong, he goes stoic, and immediately enters “action” mode. So often, the emotional woman years for a man who is going to stroke her hair, kiss her on the forehead, and talk with her for hours about the intensity of her feelings, without immediately resorting into action or problem-solving. It’s not to say that this doesn’t exist, or that men aren’t capable of showing comfort or affection, because they absolutely are. But rather, it demonstrates a fundamental, unspoken desire: women want to be nurtured the same way that they nurture.

When something goes wrong for our man, our approach to resolve is vastly different. We crawl into his lap, take him into our arms, and ask him how he’s feeling. We offer a hug, a warm meal, a vent sesh, or a blow job, as a remedy for both physical and emotional pain. The attitude behind our actions is not servitude, but devotion. It’s nurture and attunement to the soul, rather than just the physical body. As women we live straddled between worlds, with one half of us standing in the physical realm, while the other half of us — the intuitive, sensitive, “knows-what-they-need-before-they-need-it,” part of us dwells within the realm of spirit. When we offer physical support, it’s only because a part of us intuitively knows that it will soothe the soul. It’s not problem-solving, so much as it’s soul-recognition. A mother’s intuition isn’t just limited to her child — rather, it extends towards anything that she chooses to devote to and mother.

So it only makes sense, that if our soul defaults to devotion, that we expect devotion back. Not just expect, but absolutely yearn for it. We yearn for someone to pick us up in our arms and ask us how we are feeling. It’s not so-much sensical as it is biological: when women speak, our bodies release oxytocin and lower cortisol levels, which helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (aka our “rest and digest,” system). To take it a step further, the throat is connected to the yoni (which is the Sanskrit word for “womb”) through the vagus nerve. As women, the seat of our intuition — and, where we hold our deepest emotions — is within our womb space. If the goal is to regulate the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and releasing the big emotions at-play, then it only makes sense that talking about them — ranting, venting, or beating the dead horse — is the most effective method to doing so.

But for a man, who does not hold a womb, who does not experience this same vagal connection, and whose brain is fundamentally wired different — lacking the neural pathways and larger hippocampus that lead to our heightened emotional receptivity — he does not process the same way. To take it a step further, he doesn’t feel the same way. This is partially why so many women feel a gripe with their man over how they process and hold emotions. They get upset when their man isn’t crying, sobbing, or processing their emotions in the same magnitude that they are. And to be clear, men definitely feel emotions. In fact, they can sometimes feel them just as intensely. But on a neurological and biological level, they are not meant to process them the same way.

Which is why a woman’s desire to be held, nurtured, and devoted to with the same reverence that she shows him, isn’t wrong. It’s simply being directed towards the wrong channel.

Enter… the importance of female friendships.

It does not matter how emotionally intelligent your man is, how spiritually connected he is, or how deeply he loves you. He will never be able to hold you in all of the ways that your soul desires, on account of the fact that he isn’t a woman.

Your soul will never be satisfied with the love that he gives you and the love that he gives you only. Which is why it’s imperative that you find your girls.

I’m blessed to be at a point in my life where I feel like I finally have the friendships that I’ve always dreamed of. There’s my San Francisco girls, a group of five of us who are so uniquely melded together with perfect synergy. There’s my Spiritual, East Bay girls — two of my oldest and dearest friends who I don’t see as often, but feel magnetic once we come together. There’s my two Spiritual Long-Distance besties, who I talk on the phone to at least several times weekly. And then there’s my friends across the globe — a few in LA, a couple in Austin, a handful in New York, and one in Singapore. My capacity for female friendships feels perfectly full, like a cup of water situated with the perfect distance between the glass and the rim. I don’t desire new close, female friends, for I have exactly what I need.

And yet, it wasn’t always this way.

Growing up in small-town Northern California, I struggled greatly with making female friends. I was shy and quiet, reluctant to talk to kids my own age, and preferring to spend time with adults. I connected better with my teachers in school than I did with the other students. I enjoyed being home, more than I enjoyed going out. In my high school years, I didn’t go to a single party. My friendships tended to be short-lived, ending due to bullying, drama, rumors, and feeling like the girls were against me.

I yearned for female friends, but it took until my adult years until I truly started to have them. When many of them began to unravel over the last year, I found myself feeling like a child again, staring in the mirror and wondering why this was happening. A fall-out with my best friend of over ten years, the ending of a three year friendship, and choosing to walk away from a few friends that I realized were never truly aligned to begin with, were choices that were anything but easy — especially for someone who once struggled to make friends. Just this last October, I found myself sitting at a luxury hotel with the man that I love, crying to him about how I felt like was losing all of my friends. I questioned why the Universe would finally give me friends, only to then take them away and leave me back at square one. What I realize now, was that this wasn’t punishment, but alignment, and the friendships that left were making space for ones to come in that aligned with my next chapter. It was the quintessential, “she doesn’t know it yet,” moment that goes viral on TikTok. I didn’t know it yet, but as I was preparing to step into an entirely new identity — one that, for the first time, has truly felt like my most authentic and aligned self — the friendships in my life were preparing to rebalance and do the same.

Fast forward to just a few months later, and I now have the most beautiful, aligned, fulfilling friendships that I’ve ever had in my life. My phone buzzes every day with at least two of them calling. Girls show up at my door for spontaneous walks and yoga classes. Every Friday night has plans — and sometimes, like this past weekend, we end up at a festival (VIP, in a suite, overlooking the main stage — thank you, La Croix).

And at a time in my life where I feel so completely, inexplicably loved from almost every angle, I’ve come to realize this: I love men deeply. The man that I love? Nothing can compare to that. But the love that I receive from my female friendships fills me up in a completely different way… and nothing can compare to that.

The notion of a woman who meets the man of her dreams and ditches all of her friends is simply reflective of a woman who has not learned how to hold multitudes within her heart. The pain and the pleasure, the grief and the joy, the excitement and the anxiety. When you’ve learned how to hold yourself through contradictory emotions, and not crack under their pressure, but expand into the different facets of self that they bring out from within you, you create a heart that is not only expansive, but is capable of holding more. The love gets deeper. The conversations get better. The sex gets hotter. The experiences get richer. Your entire world begins to expand when you learn how to hold and accept every form of relationship and feeling for exactly what it is and revel in the magic of all of it.

I don’t expect the man that I love to hold me like a woman — I welcome his logic, his resourcefulness, his attentive listening-without-answers, and accept it as the way that he knows to hold and love me.

Just as I don’t expect the women that I adore to hold me like him. I prefer our phone yaps and debriefs over brunch, and I’m grateful that they don’t try to offer immediate solutions or cuddle the pain away.

Instead, I allow my heart to revel in the beauty that there are so many people around me who love me, who are capable of holding different parts of me, and one isn’t better than the other.

Romantic love isn’t inherently better or situated higher, hierarchically, than platonic love — it’s just different.

And prioritizing and nurturing the platonic love within my life, doesn’t mean that I care any less about romantic love — again, it’s also just different.

They’re two sides of love that make up the same coin and ultimately shape my heart for the better. And when we try to justify one as being better than another, we do ourselves such a disservice by closing a part of our hearts off from love.

What if one was never meant to replace the other? What if our desperation, discomfort, and yearning in love is actually a reflection of where the scales are tipped too-heavily in one’s direction or favor? We will resent our men when they fail to treat us like women and hold us with the reverence our hearts yearn for. Simultaneously, we will get bored of our friends when they don’t come home and into bed with us, or cut through our delusions like a man would. That’s because we were never meant to exist within the singularity of just one form of love. Rather, we are here to learn to expand our hearts to receive and feel it all.

True alignment within relationships is not finding a one-size-fits-all. In other words, it’s not about finding the one person — romantic or otherwise — who checks all of the boxes, fulfills all of your humanly needs, and forever quells all potential yearning for human connection.

Rather, alignment comes when you can both recognize and accept someone for exactly who they are, what they bring you, and how you both mutually fill each other’s hearts, in the ways that only you both know how.

What if love was never about finding the one, but instead, was about finding the one thing in every person that makes you feel seen and loved?

The man. The girls. The animals. The trees. How lucky are we to get to experience it all.

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