Freedom!

Dinner out!

A movie!

With my girlfriends. 

How very adult! 

After Japanese food, four friends and I went to see "Sex and the City." 

It was fun to see where Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte were in their lives. How much those lives had changed, but how little their friendships had differed.

Candace Bushnell, who wrote the book, "Sex and the City," upon which the TV series and movie are based, once said (with apologies) that you can live without a man, but without girlfriends, you're dead.

She's right. 

The secrets. The innermost thoughts. The shared experiences. The trust. The laughs. The nights out. The coffee. The wine. The years.

With family and age, life may not be as carefree as it once was, but it is more nuanced, richer and blessed. 

I stretched out being 18 until I was nearly 40. That string could NOT have been any tighter. It was frayed and I was beginning to hear pings. 

I had done my adventurous travels. I had lived in lots of cities. I had a number of careers. I dated different men. I did so many crazy things. 

Throughout -- I always had girlfriends. 

The movie confirmed just how important they are and will always be. 

There is a moment in the film where the friends celebrate funny, crazy, ageless Samantha's fiftieth birthday. The camera pans across the restaurant and briefly in view are four younger, single women out to find their own sex in the city. 

The camera returns to the movie's fab four. Their conversation reflects that new lives do not mean that old ones end, simply that situations might change while the wine and conversation still flow -- as long as you make time for them.

In the theatre, watching the film, my friends and I were all vicariously young and single again. Once the lights came up -- and several of us had to go to the bathroom because at this age it's not so easy to hold it in -- we returned to our cars and drove home to our families.

But not before we vowed to go out at night more frequently. 

Our lives may no longer be sex in the city, it may not even be the city, but we will go out. As Cyndi Lauper said, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

That's exactly what my friends and I plan to do.

By Dawn Yun