What you should do (or share) with your best friend once in your life

It is written in capital letters and with colors and stickers in my agenda: on October 12, I am going with my girlfriends for a weekend to Den Bosch. We have booked a boutique apartment, the address collection has begun, and the group chat has a rather fitting name (‘Den Bosch’, nice and practical). Once a year, there is a night away on the agenda and no one is allowed to touch that, only us.

Because today is National Girlfriend Day, those forever-friends need to be celebrated. With things you must do together or should have done together.

1. Going on vacation together. I roamed the bar streets with mine, we tasted goat (which I don’t like) and drank pints because my best friend didn’t know that they are basically the buckets under the beer.

2. Being an alibi for each other, because you are entitled to that without having to give a reason.

3. Living together in a house, so you know each other's idiotic habits better than you would like. My roommate had a phobia of mice, which she heard running in the walls at the Amsterdam Dappermarkt.

4. Holding each other's hair when the drinks come back up, that is pretty much the ultimate friendship confirmation and I experienced it.

5. Thinking about which nursing home you want to end up in and seeing if you can get adjacent rooms with a connecting door.

6. Sharing a person of interest. This is not a mandatory item by the way, but even if it may cause friction at first (or not), it brings you closer together.

7. Crying very hard and ugly together, because wine makes you sisterly and beer makes you brotherly, but the same tears connect you the most.