For me, spring break has always been about reading. This year, as the week drew nearer, I found myself in a small bookstore near my house browsing titles that caught my eye. On the “New and Noteworthy Nonfiction” table I glimpsed a black and white cover with neon yellow letters that read “Text Me When You Get Home,” by Kayleen Schaefer.

Drawn to the phrase that I find myself using often on Friday and Saturday when my friends and I part in our separate late-night Ubers, I opened the hardback cover to learn more. The description began with this: “For too long, women have been told that we are terrible at being friends, that we can’t help being cruel or competitive, or that we inevitably abandon each other for romantic partners. But we are rejecting those stereotypes and reclaiming the power of female friendships.”

Flash forward two weeks, and I was fully immersed into the book. “Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship,” while written by a journalist living in New York well out of college, stuck a note in many aspects of my life.

Like Schaefer, I hear the six words “text me when you get home” constantly. Whether I’m leaving my friends at night, watching television programs, or hearing groups of women on the street, it’s everywhere. But men don’t tell each other this with the consistency that women do.

Schaefer writes, “This is because women who say, ‘Text me when you get home,’ aren’t just asking for reassurance that you’ve made it to your bed unharmed. It’s not only about safety. It’s about solidarity. It’s about knowing how unsettling it can feel when you’ve been surrounded by friends and then are suddenly by yourself again.”

In other words, we text one another to continue the conversation.

Without a doubt, women try harder to maintain friendships than men do. There’s more pressure. It all sounds like very lower school playground talk– the obsessive “No, I’m her best friend and I can prove it!” kind of dialogue. But I actually think it’s true.

As of the day this article publishes, I have only 24 more days until the commencement ceremony. And then what? Already we talk about who will stay friends and who will most certainly never speak to one another again until some reunion in the distant future.

When it comes to friendships, I immediately think of my parents’ polar opposite college experiences. A member of a fraternity, my dad communicates regularly with a large group of his friends. No matter how long it’s been since their last visit, each reunion is not spent about worrying who’s kept in closer contact with whom.  My mom, on the other hand, has very few friends from when she was in college.

There’s a societal pressure put on women to try very hard to be the best friend. Especially with the rise of social media, it’s like this internal competition on how many friends we communicate with. Am I in the right group chat? Does she text her over me? Do people feel comfortable telling secrets to me? Will this person like me if I don’t post for them? As much as I am apart of this endless cycle of babble, I do sincerely believe that it’s incredibly important for women to have each other as friends.

I’ve simplified a book that really and truly changed my perspective on the friends I have, but Schaefer sums it up for me on why all the work we do and stress we place on ourselves to maintain female friendships is vital. “Our friends are not our second choice… They are our advocates, who, no matter what, make us feel like we won’t fail. They are the people who struggle with us and who will stay with us. They are who we text when we get home.”