The most important relationships you will have in your life as a woman.

Growing up, whenever I heard the word “relationship,” it only meant one thing. Man and woman. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Husband and wife.

That was the relationship I knew, lol. Not that it’s a word that just meant “any connection between two or more people” And they range from casual acquaintances and professional networks to intimate partnerships and family ties.

Even the way people asked about it carried that assumption.

“Are you in a relationship?”
“Who are you dating?”
“When are you bringing someone home?”

The word relationship almost became synonymous with romance.

But the older I get, the more I realize that some of the most life-changing relationships in your life as a woman may have absolutely nothing to do with romance.

And somehow, nobody really prepares you for that part. Relationships are not just romantic. Relationships are friendships. Relationships are mothers and daughters. Relationships are sisters. Relationships are mentors. Relationships are the woman who gave you advice one random afternoon that permanently changed how you see yourself.

Relationships are even the messy things too.

The friend that drained you. The people that made you shrink yourself. The environments that made you anxious. The acquaintance that embarrassed you publicly and changed how safe you felt around people for years.

Some relationships nourish you, stretch you, shape you quietly without you even realizing it. And some leave marks on you that take years to fully understand.

I think as women especially, relationships affect us deeply.

Because women are socialized to connect, to nurture, to hold emotional weight, to care, to remember details, to maintain bonds. So when a relationship is beautiful, it can transform your life.

And when a relationship is unhealthy, it can exhaust you in ways that are difficult to explain.

Even acquaintances sometimes carry power. One conversation with a stranger on the bus can make you believe in yourself more. Another can make you second-guess yourself for months.

That’s how significant human connection is. And one of the biggest mistakes we make is acting like only romantic relationships matter. They don’t.

Some of us are saved by friendship. Some of us are healed by community. Some of us become themselves because another woman saw us properly at the right time.

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So I sat down and made a list of some of the most important relationships I think women experience in their lifetime. Some are beautiful, painful, confusing. And some will completely change you. But all of them matter.

1. The relationship with your mother: Whether it was loving, complicated, distant, soft, painful, or a mix of everything at once; this one sets the tone for almost everything that comes after. It shapes how you see womanhood, how you receive & give love, what you normalize, what you resist, what you spend years unlearning, and what you carry forward with gratitude. You’ll spend adulthood either trying to recreate what you received from your mother or trying to heal from it. This relationship, more than almost any other, is where it all begins.

2. The relationship with the friend you meet in your first year of college/university: You probably sat next to each other by accident. Same hostel block, same class, same random queue. And something about the proximity of that season - turned a coincidence into something that mattered. She was there during the formation years, the embarrassing years, the years you were becoming someone and didn’t know it yet. Even if life has taken you in different directions, that friendship is part of your emotional foundation as a woman.

3. The relationship with the first man who set the precedent for how you expected to be loved: This is the one that quietly programs something. He may not have been your most serious relationship, but he was the first one that showed you what being chosen felt like, what disappointing felt like, what being seen or unseen by a man felt like up close. And whether that experience was beautiful or painful or both, it created a reference point your heart has been comparing things to ever since.

4. The relationship with the older woman who saw something in you: She might have been a mentor, a manager, an aunty, a neighbor, a woman you met once at an event and never forgot. She was further down the road than you and she took the time to show you something; about work, about womanhood, about how to carry yourself, about what to avoid, about what was possible. The way she speaks to you can become the voice you carry inside your head for years. Find her if you haven’t. Be her when you can.

5. The relationship with the coworker from a job you no longer work at: You were thrown together by a shared workplace and a shared experience of the same chaotic routine. And something about being in the trenches together turned into something real. Maybe she became a friend. Maybe she became a reference point for how to be a good colleague, or a cautionary tale, or someone who quietly taught you your professional worth. You’ve left the company, but not the impact.

6. The relationship with your sister: A sister is girlhood with a witness. She saw everything; your worst behavior, the version of you that only exists at home with the guard completely down. She fights with you in a language nobody else speaks and loves you in one just as specific. She is your first experience of navigating a close relationship with another woman, and that shapes how you show up in your female relationships for the rest of your life. If you have a sister, please don’t take that for granted.

7. The relationship with the first situationship that genuinely confused you: Not necessarily the first person you dated - the first one that really got under your skin and stayed there longer than it should have. The one where the lines were blurry and the feelings were disproportionately large and you spent more time than you’d like to admit trying to decode what you were to each other. This relationship teaches you things about yourself that no straightforward love story could, it’s rarely a good time while it is happening. But it’s almost always instructive in hindsight.

8. The relationship with your father: The women who had difficult relationships with their fathers will tell you that their father is present in the way they move through the world; in the things they swore they’d never tolerate, and in the independence that was built from that experience. Whether he was present, absent, loving, passive, harsh, gentle, emotionally available, or emotionally distant, it affects something. For many women, it quietly shapes safety, validation, trust, emotional regulation, and even what they expect from men later in life.

9. The relationship with the woman in your life who modeled what a bad relationship looked like: Maybe it was a close aunt. Maybe it was a close friend you watched go through something painful. She wasn’t a lesson you asked for, but she became one anyway. She showed you things to look out for, and to take seriously before they become something harder to leave. If she eventually found her way out, she showed you that too. The women who let us witness their journey - even the hard parts of it, give us something that protects us, even when they don’t know they’re doing it.

10. The relationship with the friendship that ended and taught you more than most that stayed: She was your person for a season. You told her things. You built something real. And then it ended - but the grief of a friendship ending is so often underestimated, because people don’t hold space for it the way they do for romantic endings. Losing that close female friendship reshaped you significantly. It taught you about what you need from the people closest to you, about what you are willing to tolerate, about what your loyalty is worth and who deserves it. It stayed with you.

11. The relationship with that one brutally honest person who said the thing you needed to hear: A therapist who named the pattern. A friend who loved you enough to be honest when honesty was uncomfortable. A woman who sat across from you and said the thing that everyone else had been dancing around. That relationship - however brief, however professional, however unlikely; can be the one that changes the entire trajectory. Take it seriously when you find it.

12. The relationship with your younger self: At some point, every woman realizes she is either protecting, punishing, abandoning, or healing the younger version of herself. Some women are still deeply ashamed of the girl they once were; and so they spend adulthood trying to outrun her, silence her, or act like she never existed. It’s important to stop treating your younger self like someone embarrassing to escape from, and start treating her like someone worthy of compassion, your entire relationship with yourself softens.

13. The relationship with your present self: The way you treat yourself right now affects everything more than you realize. How you speak to yourself. How you carry yourself. How you take care of your body. How you comfort yourself after hard days. How you reward yourself. How you allow people treat you. All of it slowly shapes the quality of your life. When you genuinely starts caring for herself, it changes how you move through the world. You become softer with yourself, and more honest about what you deserve.

Lucky you if you’ve experienced all of these relationships in healthy ways. I don’t think we talk enough about how much relationships shape women. A lot of who we become is tied to what we experienced inside connection.

And maybe that’s why these relationships matter so much. Because sometimes, another person can become a mirror.

And through them, you either lose parts of yourself…

Or finally meet yourself properly for the first time.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you already know the kind of things I sit with.

The quiet weight. The patterns we don’t name. The versions of ourselves we outgrow and the ones we’re still trying to understand.

I wrote more of this in my book, No One Warned You About This Part.

It holds the conversations around firstborn daughters, choosing yourself, emotional patterns, and the parts of you that are still learning how to soften.

If you’ve ever read something here and felt like it stayed with you longer than you expected, the book might meet you in that same place.

You can find it using the link below.

Get No One Warned You About This Part.