Every Girl Needs Her Girls And the Research Supports It
Your girls aren't just good for your soul — they're good for your brain
For a long time, when things got hard, I disappeared. Not physically, but inward. The instinct was automatic: pull back, go quiet, and handle it alone. The logic underneath it, though I wouldn’t have named it then, was simple and terrifying: if people saw me struggling, they would leave. So I left first.
It took seven months of unemployment to find out I was wrong.
Through it all; the uncertainty, the rejection, the mornings that were harder to start than they should have been — people stayed. They showed up without being asked. They didn’t treat me like a problem to solve or a situation to manage. They just kept being there.
And something that had functioned as a survival strategy for years — the isolation, the self-sufficiency, the performance of being fine — started to fall apart in the best possible way.
This is not just one woman’s story. It is, increasingly, the story of a generation.
The Shift Nobody Announced
Women today are living lives their grandmothers could not have imagined and their mothers were still fighting for. According to the Pew Research Center, women ages 25 to 34 now hold bachelor’s degrees at a rate of 47%, compared to 37% of men.
The American Association of University Women reports that women earn nearly twice as many master’s degrees as men and have surpassed them in law school, medical school, dental school, and pharmacy school. As of 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women became the majority of the college-educated labor force.
Financial independence at this scale changes everything downstream — including what women need from their relationships, and which relationships they prioritize.
Marriage rates have dropped roughly 60% over the last fifty years, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. The average age of first marriage is now 28 for women and 30 for men, per U.S. Census Bureau data. A 2023 Pew Research survey found that 85% of millennials and Gen Z say marriage is not necessary for a fulfilling life. This is not a generation that gave up on connection. It is a generation that stopped outsourcing it to a single relationship.
What has grown in its place is something quieter and, the research suggests, more neurologically powerful than most people realize.
The Biology of Belonging
Female friendship is not a soft subject. The science is not soft either.
Genuine social connection triggers the release of dopamine and serotonin — the neurotransmitters responsible for feelings of contentment and stability. It boosts oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which directly counteracts cortisol, the body’s primary stress chemical. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology found that the quality of adult friendships is one of the strongest predictors of wellbeing across the lifespan — more predictive, in many measures, than income or relationship status.
Women have built the infrastructure to access these benefits in ways men, broadly, have not. According to Pew Research, women are twice as likely as men to regularly discuss their mental health with close friends — 31% compared to 15%. Among women under 50, that number rises to 43%. Women communicate with close friends more frequently across every channel: calls, texts, video, in person.
Men are equally likely to have a close friend. They are far less likely to use that friendship as emotional infrastructure. The result is a loneliness epidemic that has no quiet precedent — and a gender gap in social connection that is not accidental. It is the long consequence of a culture that told men vulnerability was weakness. Women were never given that particular miseducation.
Fullness as Prevention
There is a version of mental health that looks like crisis management — therapy, medication, intervention. All of it matters. None of it is the whole picture.
There is another version that looks like a life so full there is no room for the spiral to start. Not avoidance. Not distraction. Fullness. The kind that comes from having enough people, enough community, enough belonging that solitude becomes a choice rather than a default — that when the hard thing happens, there is somewhere to put it.
This is what shifts when women find their people. Not the absence of difficulty, but the presence of enough that difficulty doesn’t hollow you out. The group chat that actually goes somewhere. The friend who knows what you mean before you finish the sentence. The community that stays when your situation is not at its best.
It doesn’t require a best friend in every direction. It requires enough. Enough that you are never truly alone with the worst version of your thoughts.
What Gets Built When Women Gather
Beyond the Myc has always understood something the wellness industry is still working to articulate: that culture and mental health are not separate concerns. To be seen in your creativity, your history, your ambition — to exist in a space where your full self is the starting point and not the negotiation — is itself a form of care.
Muse Circle, Beyond the Myc’s community arm, exists at exactly this intersection. It is a space for creatives, thinkers, and culture-shapers — centering Black women — to gather not just around content but around the kind of learning and connection that does not happen in traditional spaces. Strategy alongside story. Creative identity alongside cultural literacy. The media ecosystem, demystified, held together by people who are building similar futures.
It is not a program. It is not a platform. It is, in the truest sense of the research, an architecture of connection — one where the growth is collective and the belonging is real. Where showing up and actually arriving are the same thing.
The data makes the case. But the case was already being made, quietly, in the lives of women who stopped waiting for the right moment to need people and started building community before the crisis came.
Every girl needs her girls — not because she cannot stand alone, but because the ground is more solid when you are not the only one standing on it.
The question is not whether community matters for your mental health. The research settled that.
The question is whether you have built one yet.