Women Are Chasing Boyfriends When They Should Be Choosing Friends

There is a very specific kind of crying that belongs exclusively to your twenties. It’s those moments when you collapse onto the bathroom floor at midnight, sit on a crowded subway car, or let yourself drop onto the rug at home. It is the exact moment when you realize, through silent sobs, that the world is too heavy, expectations are too sharp, and you are utterly alone. Maybe it’s a devastating breakup, a profound loss, or maybe the person you have lost is yourself. Maybe you just failed a class. But if you are a woman in your twenties, you have experienced this kind of crying one way or another.

We grow up romanticizing our twenties, expecting them to be years of absolute freedom, romance, and lifelong friendships already locked into place. In reality, we spend these years being pulled in every direction by changing circumstances, bad romances, and exhausting jobs until we almost forget what softness feels like. No matter how strong we look from the outside, we feel desperately lonely in those moments. Because as we struggle to discover ourselves and become the person we want to be, friendships become just as difficult.

In fact, meeting people is easier than ever through universities, mutual friends, and endless social media feeds. But having a crowd around you does not mean you have that one true female friend who carefully heals everything the modern world breaks inside you before you even notice it. For years, on those nights when I lay on the floor sobbing, I continued to feel utterly alone despite having dozens of people around me. Because the greatest loneliness in your twenties is not actually being alone. It is feeling lonely among the wrong people.

There is a vast difference between someone knowing you and truly seeing you. Modern loneliness is not about being alone in a room; it is being unable to make your own voice heard amid the noise of laughter and fake sincerity. The more crowded your surroundings, the tighter the door to that silent room inside you closes. When you sit in a café, if everyone is looking at you but no one truly sees you, you begin to feel like a mere prop rather than a person at the table. The crowd of the wrong people tells you that you are not alone, yet with every sob, it pushes you a little closer to the bathroom floor.

Eventually, unable to understand this contradiction, I decided to ask about it in therapy:

"There are many people around me, but I still feel utterly alone. I don’t feel emotionally fulfilled in my friendships."

My therapist pointed out the ultimate mistake of our twenties: we let coincidence curate our lives.

School hallways, shared workplaces, and random encounters throw people into our path, and we let them stay without ever pausing to ask: "Is this someone I actually want to be friends with? Does this person match my soul?" If we questioned our female friendships and acted as selectively as we do with romance, we would have much happier and more deeply rooted friendships. Then she asked me a painful question: "Is there a single female friend in your life who entered it outside of mere coincidence, someone you chose entirely of your own free will?"

In that moment, everything in my mind turned to ice. I realized that until that day, I hadn’t consciously chosen a single person. Driven by an intense fear of being left out, I had constantly tolerated disrespect and created excuses for people. I wasn’t searching for true friendship; I was simply trying not to be abandoned. I was keeping certain people in my life not because I genuinely wanted them there, but because I was afraid of them leaving. I normalised even the people who made me feel small, focusing more on whether they would abandon me than on whether they truly understood me.

To choose someone requires filtering others out and accepting the risk of being completely alone.

Yet growing up under the shadow of abandonment anxiety, many of us spend our twenties terrified of that freedom. We accept people simply because they happen to be standing there when life pushes us into a new environment. Drawing a boundary feels equivalent to the nightmare of turning around and finding no one behind us. Every act of tolerance we extend to protect ourselves is often a sacrifice made from our own soul. We allow the table to consume us just to remain seated at it because someone leaving feels like the erasure of our own existence. And a person often realizes too late that while constantly trying not to be abandoned, they have actually begun abandoning themselves. After a while, a person tries to fill that void through romantic relationships. We want to believe that if we find that "great love" promised by society, everything will be healed. However, in the very center of those relationships, we often find ourselves even lonelier. Popular culture constantly sells us the lie that the right person will fill all our existential voids like a missing puzzle piece. This is why we cast aside the deep, laborious search for tenderness in friendships and place our entire emotional investment onto a single romantic partner. We expect them to be our lover, our confidant, and the healer who lifts us from the floor. Yet this is too heavy a burden for any relationship to carry. In the end, even in those few inches of space between us when we turn our backs in bed, we encounter that eerie loneliness once again.

Because a partner can never truly understand the way the world batters us, or the invisible burdens women carry. Romantic relationships can offer momentary refuge, but lasting healing begins when those who speak the same emotional language touch each other's wounds. We are a generation hyper-focused on finding the love of our lives, yet we rarely talk about the person who actually holds our lives together, the one who lifts us off that cold bathroom floor. In an era where capitalism and modern life seem determined to pull us apart, moving beyond coincidence and finding "my person"—someone who knows your vulnerability and chooses to protect it like a fortress—is one of life's greatest luxuries.

Romantic partners might not teach us who we want to be, but that female friendship chosen with our own hands—that unwavering loyalty—is often the thing that reminds us who we already are.

Right in the middle of that loud silence, my phone screen lit up. The message came from a female friend I had known years earlier. After a seemingly insignificant disagreement over the color of a design, we stopped speaking and went years without exchanging a single word. We had grown incredibly distant, with the snide resentment that time and silence often create standing between us. When I saw her message, I felt shocked and angry. My walls had become so thick that I initially perceived even that gesture of tenderness as a threat. The fragile girl staring at that screen had no idea that this woman would eventually teach her the meaning of true friendship, unconditional love, and a bond so sacred that distance could never erode it. But the truth was simpler than that. She had sensed the tremor in my soul while quietly watching from afar. And when she sent that message while I was crying on the bathroom floor, she forgot every past resentment in an instant. Her only concern was comforting me, holding me, and helping me feel less alone. With her, I never had to explain myself at length. Over time, we learned how to look after each other without even realizing it. I never had to teach her how to love me. She just knew.

Only we can love ourselves exactly the way we want to be loved. But there are rare, extraordinary people who enter our lives and somehow manage to love us in that language we've always longed for, while wrapping us in a generosity that comes entirely from within themselves. Once that true "my person" enters your life, you choose her again and again—in every conversation, every coffee, and every moment you share. A conscious choice is a rejection of coincidence. It is the courage to look into someone's soul and say, "Yes, I invite you into the most fragile parts of my life." When you choose a true friend, you build a safe harbor against the brutal waves of the modern world. It is a choice made freely, seeing her flaws while fearlessly placing your own fractures into her hands. To choose a woman as a friend is, in many ways, to choose yourself. You choose your worth. You choose how you want to be loved. You choose who you want to become. As you choose her, you choose yourself too. As you love her more, you begin to love yourself more. And every piece of good news in her life feels like a celebration even greater than your own success.

We accept the love we think we deserve. We grew up admiring the iconic friendships of popular culture, longing for a Meredith and Cristina or a Blair and Serena. My advice to every woman navigating the treacherous waters of her twenties is simple: Choose people who make the chaos of these years easier to carry. Choose people you can hold hands with and laugh beside in the middle of the storm.

Since she entered my life, I have still experienced heartbreak, uncertainty, and difficult moments.

But not a single second has passed in which I have felt emotionally unfulfilled in my friendship.

Not a single moment has gone by without my eyes welling up with gratitude for her existence.

Because no matter how brutally the world breaks us, the tenderness of the woman you chose with your own hands will always help lift you from the floor. Even though our twenties often feel like an endless crisis, they are actually a painful transition corridor where we learn to become the editors of our own narrative. And the grand prize at the end of that corridor is not the flawless life dictated to us by society. It is that one person we choose to bring into our lives of our own free will, someone who accepts us in all our rawness and brokenness, without filters.

Now I know that the love we deserve is not the kind that shrinks us beneath the shadow of fear, but the kind that allows us to expand into who we truly are. We grow on the shoulders of the women who walk beside us and make that road a little easier to carry. And at the end of the day, perhaps the most revolutionary act in a woman's life is to lay down her fears, open her heart to a friend chosen by her own hands, and rediscover her strength, her beauty, and herself in the mirror of that friendship.