The group chat comes in four

The blueprint was written on screen, and we just keep casting ourselves.

April 2026 | Written By Kiki Pape

It’s not a coincidence that you and your friends can map yourselves onto the four girls on screen.

Four girls sit on a couch, staring at a TV, watching four girls sit on a couch right back at them. Sex and the City, Girls, The Sex Lives of College Girls—the formula repeats. Different cities, different problems, same structure. Four women in conversation somehow always feel the most honest, the most complete, like they were always meant to be.

But why is it always four? And why do we feel the need to fit ourselves so neatly inside them?

I remember the first time I watched a group of four women on screen, each one representing a different version of girlhood. It felt familiar before I even had the language for why. 

My mom introduced me to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and for her, it reinforced the idea that girlhood sits at the center of your life. Female friendship is not just formative but foundational and essential. The people you grow with become the people you measure life by. 

We watch these stories everywhere: alone in bed with a face mask on, at a birthday sleepover, or rotting on the couch with roommates after a long night out. The settings change, but the message stays the same: your friends are your soulmates.

Like most people, we compare our lives to what we see on screen. We search for relatability in characters whose problems are scripted, but still somehow feel close enough to our own. Their chaos becomes comforting. Their heartbreaks, bad decisions, and identity crises feel manageable because they are shared, parceled out between four people, never carried by one alone.

And in that chaos, we assign roles.

Somewhere along the way, these characters stopped being just characters and became archetypes. Almost like zodiac signs, but better dressed. 

Since the 1990s, women have been saying “I’m a Carrie” or “I’m a Samantha” as shorthand for an entire personality: how they love, how they speak, what they fear, what they wear. The label becomes a shortcut. It gives language to the version of ourselves we want people to understand immediately.

Clearly, I can spot the parts of myself that feel very Carrie: the writing, the love of shoes, the occasionally questionable relationship to financial stability. But I can also look around at my friends and start assigning everyone else their roles, too. One is the practical one. One is romantic. One is the wild card. One is the observer who somehow holds it all together.

Just like the infamous Carrie Bradshaw, “And then I wondered… Do we all relate to all women?” 

We all resemble all the good parts of all of them. Well, at least sometimes. The funny thing is, we put these women in boxes, but we can all check off their qualities as our own. It is important we show all types of versions of a person, especially as women, we aren’t linear. 

As a society, we don’t understand the weight that representation has on us. The more complex, silly, beautiful women we see on screen. The weight of life gets lifted, and the girls by your side are right there to support you along the way. 

The archetypes were created to bring us women, together, but now we need to expand the boxes. Expanding minds of what the chaos of womanhood is. 

Now, the next time you sit down and watch Sex Lives of College Girls or Sex in the City, instead of immediately identifying with Samantha, ask yourself if you resemble any parts of Charlotte. Because I guarantee you might.