I think marriage is overrated. Who you pick as your best friends matters much more.

• I met my best friends when I was 16.
• While I've been in love with partners, no one will ever come close to replacing my friends.

Your one true love doesn't need to be a romantic partner — it can be your best friends. I found mine at 16, and no one will ever know me as well or love me as much as they do. Though I'm head over heels for my boyfriend and hope we can find lasting commitment, he won't ever be the love of my life; that position is occupied.

I met Holly and Danielle in high school while my parents were playing out an acrimonious divorce. Driving around for hours with Nirvana on the tiny car radio, we pored over every bitter development. They were the only ones to ask how I felt and to wait patiently until I was able to answer. Before those car rides, I hadn't known that saying something out loud could help me understand it.

For the next 36 years, our lives intertwined like the roots of old trees. Calls have yielded to texts, our once lissome bodies to something a bit saggier, but the words have remained the same: "Tell us how you feel." No joy or heartache — no small fracture or tectonic shift — feels entirely real until we tell each other. And in sharing, we figure out what we feel.

It took us a while to love each other like we do

We didn't fall in love right away. Like most meaningful things, that love took time.

Indeed, the beginning was hardly auspicious. I had a brief summer fling with a boy Holly loved. Danielle broke up with a close friend of mine of whom I felt fiercely protective. Holly mistrusted me; I looked askance at Danielle.

But one balmy summer evening, we found ourselves the last ones left at a backyard party. Holly, in her usual way, got right to the point.

"Well, we're here, this is awkward, but we might as well talk it out," she said. "You betrayed me, and I have feelings about that."

So we talked it out. It was the most honest I had ever been in my life. Then we cried, and in that moment we underwent a curious alchemy, becoming one from three.

"We got through that," Danielle said later that night, marveling as we hugged.

All these years later, that alchemy is still at work. Three can be an awkward number in a friendship, but for us it balances and strengthens it like the legs of a stool. Sometime after we started having babies we began calling ourselves "the coven" because it captured the spooky forces at work between us. Now it's the name of our text chain.

We're honest with each other

Of all the invisible witchcraft that unites us, our most potent bond is honesty. The rules of our friendship require us to dig deep, excavate the unalloyed truth, and share it.

On the rare occasions when one of us has been less than honest, we've regretted it. In the weeks before my wedding, I avoided speaking to Holly and Danielle, knowing that if I did I'd have to confess my misgivings. Six unhappy years later, I divorced my husband.

What underlies our honesty is admiration; I respect my friends too much to lie to them. That admiration makes us generous. If one of my friends says something with which I disagree, my instinct is to pause, silence my misgivings, and view it from their perspective. How different it has been with the men in my life, with whom even minor disputes so often escalate into mortal duals.

My ex-husband learned the hard way how to calm me down during our fights. "Go ahead and call them," he'd say. "I know that's what you want to do."

After my first miscarriage, I was stricken until I heard Holly's and Danielle's voices. After my divorce, I was left with a mortgage, a baby, and a confusion so deep I could not name it — until they named it for me. The comfort I felt in their support, the simple feeling of being understood, reminded me how bitterly lonely I'd felt in my marriage. After dropping my daughter off at college last fall, the leaden heaviness I experienced walking out of her dorm lifted only after I called them.

I have felt that same vertigo many times over the years, but I always knew there was a net to catch me before I hit the ground.

My friends have helped me parent better by seeing me as more than a mom. "OK, that's how your kids are, now how are you?" they'll say. That hasn't erased my doubts about being a good enough mom, but it has helped me remember the parts of me that function, even excel, outside of motherhood. Maybe I would have been able to traverse the parental terrain without them, but the trip certainly wouldn't have been as joyous.

Sometimes we fight

Sure, the three of us still have our squabbles, hurts, and misunderstandings. No amount of generosity or patience can completely eliminate them, nor would I want them to. In fact, those jagged moments are what I treasure the most. The greatest lesson I have learned from our friendship is that love, even as deep and abiding as ours, is never a given but must be continuously earned. Over endless discussions and tears — often involving wine, chocolate, and tarot — we have not only always re-earned our love but found it strengthened.

My parents, caught on the sharp edges of their own hurt, anger, and disappointment, were never able to model unconditional love. My ex-husband and I, for that matter, weren't either. But my daughters have a model of it in my friendship with Holly and Danielle.

I hope that my kids find romantic love; I still think marriage and commitment are risks worth taking. But I hope they also know that the friends they choose will end up being the most enduring force in their lives.

On February 14, I'm sure I'll kiss my boyfriend, tell him I love him — and I do — and give him a thoughtful gift. But he knows better than to think my heart is entirely his. The real loves of my life will be waiting patiently on our text chain to hear how it all went.

Read more Valentine's Day stories here.