In the end, it wasn’t about the sex. Or the Manolo Blahniks. Or men with nice buns, bank accounts or bubbes. For the ladies of “Sex and the City,” there was but a single item listed on the bottom line: love. Not with the men of their dreams, but with each other. “Year after year, my single girlfriends were my salvation,” Carrie Bradshaw says in the film. I know the feeling. I have three girlfriends from college-Kelley, Kathy and Melinda-who have been among the very closest people to me for 20 years. While we’re not quite Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, their bond, though fictitious and slightly more fabulous, mirrors our own.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)