As a woman who loves her female friends deeply, I was beguiled and moved by this Atlantic article, “What if Friendship, not Marriage, was at the Center of Life?”

I was moved primarily by Kami and Kate, two women whose friendship, which began in the Marine Corps, outlasted marriages and sustained child-raising.

“West and Tillotson realized that people understand boot camp to be an intense setting, the kind of environment that could breed an equally intense friendship,” Rhaina Cohen writes. “When the friends began to refer to each other as ‘boot-camp besties,’ people’s confusion finally faded.”

I haven’t been to military boot camp, but some friendships I’ve made during particularly tough times–college, graduate school, life in a very small town—have stuck, lasted and grown with time. That one female friendship could become the primary sustaining bond in someone’s life? I get it.

This article also led me to The Friendship Files, a collection of Atlantic articles about friends!