(UNDATED) 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. Thousands of single 20-something women arrive in New York City every year in search of two things _ “labels and love,” Carrie Bradshaw says near the beginning of the “Sex and the City” movie. And “year after year, my single girlfriends were my salvation,” Carrie says. 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. We live in four different cities now, which makes getting together for lunch a challenge. Nevertheless, through bad hairstyles and bad men, career changes and children, illnesses and identity crises, our friendship has been a safe harbor. While we’re not quite Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, their bond, though fictitious and slightly more fabulous, mirrors our own. What always rang true to me and many of my lady friends was the friendship between the four lead characters. Those women are us. In life, lovers might come and go, and so will some friends who, perhaps, are meant only for a season and not a lifetime. True friendship, like true love, is rare and precious. As I watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte clack across the movie screen in their high heels and impossible outfits, their time-tested relationship reminded me of a verse from Proverbs that says (with my gender-tweaked paraphrase): A person with many friends may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a sister. Recently, I spent some time with a new book with similar, if unexpected, themes to the “Sex and the City” movie. “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope and Happily Ever After” is a surprising work by Trish Ryan, a 30-something New England writer and avid fan of HBO’s fabulous foursome. Ryan’s delightful, sometimes bawdy spiritual memoir chronicles her lifelong pursuit of a soul mate. The path is long and messy, as it is for most of us, and Ryan discovers that in addition to the man-shaped hole, she also has a God-shaped hole. “What I love about `Sex and the City’ is that it shows how messy (that search) is,” Ryan told me. It reminded me of a passage in her book about a debauched summer she spent with a boyfriend in Montreal. “I was so desperate for female companionship that I went out and rented `Sex and the City’ DVDs, just for some girl time. … And `Sex and the City’ sort of saved me.” Giving away the end of Ryan’s book would be as criminal as telling you whether Carrie and Big wind up together forever. So I won’t give too much plot away. I will say that, 50 pages into Ryan’s book, I sent an e-mail to Kelley, Kathy and Melinda, urging them to run out and buy the book. The scene that clinched it reminded me so much of my trio of friends that I found myself reading through tears. Ryan is trapped in an abusive nightmare of a first marriage. She needs to escape but doesn’t know how, she sobs to her best friend, Kristen, by phone one night. The next morning, a FedEx package arrives for Ryan with the keys to Kristen’s summer house in Connecticut and a check for $1,000. “That was the day I decided to run away,” she writes. And she does. “I would do it for them. They would do it for me,” Ryan says. “Giving everything you possibly can to save your friend, and you really can’t save each other, but you can help out.” I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, my girls would do anything for me, and I for them. That’s the kind of friendship we have. That’s the kind of love we share, the same kind of love and friendship that is the emotional anchor _ the soul, if you will _ of “Sex and the City.” Or as Carrie’s personal assistant (played by Jennifer Hudson) says in a pivotal scene in the movie: “Love is the thing, you know.” (Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”) KRE/PH END FALSANI700 words A photo of Cathleen Falsani is available via https://religionnews.com.