In the Company of Women...
Sisterhood taught me how to be loved & held
Before we dive in, I want to share an update with you directly. Due to an unforeseen delay that’s out of my control, the tour and book timeline are being pushed back. If you purchased tickets, they will be honored for new dates or refunded. The new link to repurchase tickets will be available soon.
Listen to me the essay or read it below.
There is a kind of intimacy that does not ask you to be possessed in order to be held. It does not need a title to prove it is real. It does not rise and fall on desire. It lives in the body as something steady. Something remembered. I’ve heard elders speak of this kind of closeness. It’s ancestral, really, and it’s been how we have kept ourselves and each other alive for decades.
The deepest and most intimate love I’ve ever known hasn’t been romantic.
It’s been platonic. I didn’t start to feel this type of love until my late twenties, from the family I had chosen. And from the women that I know and have claimed me as their kin.
Before the world tried to narrow love into something small and private, we knew it as collective. We knew it as the hands that reached for us when we were falling. The voices that called our names with care, telling us to climb, to come out of the valley, to take the hand being extended. The rooms where we could exhale without explanation—where what was heavy in us could be spoken out loud, without those shame-filled whispers.
I remember speaking to a woman about the importance of sisterhood and how necessary friendship with women has been in my life. Her response didn’t meet me. It closed. She actually looked quite disgusted when I shared this, which surprised me.
She said, plainly, almost proudly: I’m a boy’s girl. Always have been.
I grew up around boys. I have brothers. And now I’m a boy mom.
All I need is my husband and my sons.
She didn’t pause.
I don’t need women friends.
Plus, women never liked me. I always felt out of place with them.
Hearing that made a lot of things make sense, and also shed a light on why she’d always seemed standoffish around other women unless she was the center of attention.
And then, like it had been handed to her as a badge of honor, she added:
My parents always told me it would be hard for me—because I’m light-skinned and have “good” hair—that girls just wouldn’t like me. So I learned not to need them. Anyway, I’m fine with my man, my brothers, and my kids.
I remember sitting there, trying to fix my face and not judge her, because honestly, that wasn’t a surprise to hear. Especially as a fellow Black woman. These sorts of narratives are imposed on us very early and are rooted in (if we are being honest) white supremacy, internalized misogyny, and (of course) the patriarchy. I had sympathy for her and recognized the cost of that belief.
Because even though she, like so many of us, was taught that that is liberation, it’s not. I wouldn’t wish it on any woman to move through this life without sister-friends.
This is what happens when rejection is explained to you before you have the chance to form your own understanding of connection—when you’re taught to see other women as a threat before they ever have the chance to be anything else. It’s what happens when you build a life around where you feel accepted, instead of asking where you might actually be known.
After that conversation, I thought about how much intimacy gets lost that way.
How many conversations never happen.
How much care never gets exchanged.
How many mirrors we refuse, because we’ve already decided what we’re going to see.
Because sisterhood is going to ask something of you. It will ask you to be seen and to be vulnerable.
It will ask you to decenter men and become more than the roles you were told you had to be. It will ask you to unlearn what you were taught about other women—and about yourself.
But it will also give you something you cannot build in isolation or in the company of men, especially the ones who are attracted to you.
Sisterhood will beckon: Witnessing. Reflection. And a kind of love that doesn’t depend on your silence or your shrinking to be known.
I couldn’t help but feel that she deserved more than what she had settled for. It pained me to realize she could live over 40 years without a woman in her life she could fully be herself with. That she had not been taught that sisterhood is a gift. She made it clear where she stood. So I let it go.
As unfortunate as this is, so many of us were taught—directly or subtly—that other women are our competition. That closeness with each other is risky. That comparison is inevitable. That it’s safer to distance ourselves than to be seen.
So we learn to keep space.
We learn to mistrust.
We learn to go without.
Even when we are actually longing for connection.
We learn to mistake being desired by men for real closeness—confusing their attention with intimacy and their proximity with care. Unlearning this changes everything. Sisterhood has taught me how to be held. It’s given a bar that is high and standards I will not waiver on.
It’s shown me what platonic intimacy is, and what it’s not. It is not a spectacle.It is not performance. It is not rooted in shrinking or a lack of vulnerability. But it is grounded in being fully known and still being met with care.
There is a particular kind of relief in being loved without being evaluated—especially by the women you trust and keep close. When no one is measuring your worth by your usefulness, your beauty, or your ability to keep them comfortable. When you can arrive tired, undone, uncertain, and still be received.
Your body feels the difference. Your shoulders drop. Your breath deepens. You remember yourself.
Non-romantic intimacy holds what romance alone cannot.
It spreads the responsibility of care across many hands. It refuses the lie that one person should be everything—because that kind of pressure will break even the most well-intentioned.
Community love and care do not collapse under that weight. It carries you in rotation. It teaches you that when one person is tired, another will step in, and vice versa. That when you cannot see clearly, someone else will remind you of who you are.
And there is accountability in that, too. Not the kind that shames you into shutting up, but the kind that calls you back to yourself. The kind that says:
I love you enough to be honest. I love you enough not to let you disappear. I love you enough to see you when you’re shattered and still pick you up off the floor—unfearful of being cut by the sharp edges of your grief.
This is where reciprocity lives—not as a transaction, but as a practice.
I know everyone’s story and relationships are different. I know that some will relate to this essay and others won’t. But the company I keep, the women who are in my very small circle, remind me of what true love is every single day.
We check on each other. We show up. We hold each other accountable. And we remember who we are.
And in that remembering, we resist.
We resist the idea that love must be earned through suffering.
We resist the belief that intimacy only counts if it is romantic.
We resist the isolation that tells us to keep our needs small and our lives contained.
Because you know what? We have always known something deeper. It’s visceral. It’s in our DNA.
Love is not meant to be held between lovers and lovers alone.
It is meant to move. To stretch. To circulate. To multiply. To reach people—like the woman I spoke to—and remind them that love is not scarce, not limited to one place, and not something you have to narrow your life to receive. Some of the most sacred intimacy you will ever know will not come from someone calling you theirs. It will come from the people who sit with you in the in-between when you’re lost. The ones who see you clearly and do not turn away. The ones who show you, again and again: You do not have to be anything other than who you are to be held here.
That is not lesser love; it’s the kind that makes it possible to stay exactly where your feet are.
xo,
Alex
This newsletter is free for the community. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing, sharing, commenting, and/or ordering my new book: THE COMPANY WE KEEP.
I have very polarized emotions about this text - I completely agree with all the words, I feel it in my bones they must be true and in the same time I ache inside because although I am deep in my 40s, I struggle to find true friendship, overwhelmed with my cptsd where therapy seems to do only so much.
I crave for true friendship but I feel I don’t even know where to look, how to find true good friendships at this age, but also, how to be a good friend myself - I know very well how to overgive, how to shrink myself, how to not be authentic in a desperate way trying not to be abandoned for what I am…
As the text says “It’s what happens when you build a life around where you feel accepted, instead of asking where you might actually be known.” I have spent my entire life in the first verse of this sentence, never realizing I have the birth given right to choose, to ask. Thank you for your words od wisdom Alex, as always ❤️🩹
This hit deep!!