There's a quote from Sex And The City that I always remember when I'm overwhelmed with love for my best girlfriends: "Maybe we could be each other's soulmates. And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with." When I first heard the quote spoken by Charlotte to her best friends Carrie, Miranda, and Samantha, I immediately related to it — and I'm sure I wasn't alone. While the importance of romantic love shouldn't be discredited, the love between friends is undeniably a different sort of beautiful and important — and it deserves to be celebrated just as much as romantic love is celebrated on Valentine's Day. Thankfully, as the years go on, more and more opportunities to acknowledge the special bonds of friendship emerge. One of the most well-known, however, is undoubtedly Galentine's Day, which originated in a Season 2 episode of Parks And Recreation only to become an actual unofficial holiday for women around the world. In short, as the show described it, to celebrate Galentine's Day was to celebrate the amazing female friendships you have in your life. It's a day to do everything from share funny Galentine's Day memes that honor your best friend to simply telling your best friends how much they mean to you. Basically it's the day we should all honor our closest gal pals, because the love between friends is a love worth honoring.

If you haven't seen the episode of Parks And Recreation where Leslie Knope explains the meaning of Galentine's Day, you should absolutely check it out literally right now. It happened in a 2010 Season 2 episode, which was titled, fittingly, "Galentine's Day." The episode, with its description of the holiday — "Every Feb. 13, my lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home, and we just come and kick it, breakfast-style. Ladies celebrating ladies! It’s like Lilith Fair, minus the angst. Plus, frittatas!" — would forever change the way the world celebrates female friendships, and only for the better. And hey, understandably so: good food, good friends, and lots of love sound like the perfect combination to me, especially as a lead-in to Valentine's Day. Friendships, after all, are often much longer-lasting than romantic relationships are. As the series continued, the unofficial holiday returned a few times in episodes, and, well... the rest, as they say, was history. The idea of Galentine's Day was quickly adapted into actual celebrations by fans of the show, and soon, even people who hadn't seen Parks And Recreation were calling up their girlfriends to plan a Galentine's Day brunch with bottomless waffles and frittatas. Honestly, it's sort of beautiful in and of itself how the formerly fictional holiday became an actual thing.

The purpose of Galentine's Day is quite similar to that of Friendsgiving. In the case of Friendsgiving, you spend a holiday that is traditionally celebrated with family instead with the family you choose: Your friends. On Galentine's Day, you spend the day with your lady friends, who often play an even more important role in any woman's life than a romantic relationship does. Each honors the important and necessary role friends play, and both occur before holidays traditionally meant to be spent with someone — or multiple someones in both cases, technically — else. Also, both have delicious food.

Do you have a best friend in your life who you're pretty sure is your soulmate? Honor them this Galentine's Day by making sure they know it. Read on for funny Galentine's Day memes to share that celebrate your best friend through everything.