“You’re going to love this show,” my friend told me, as he sat me down in the La-Z-Boy he had somehow snuck into his college dorm and poured me a whiskey. “I saw it and I immediately thought of you.” The show was My Boys, a TBS sitcom that ran from 2006 to 2010, and from the first scene I saw why he had been so excited. The show centered around PJ, a tomboy sportswriter from Chicago, and her “boys,” the group of men she considered her best friends. She had one girlfriend, Stephanie, who wore makeup and was usually played for laughs.

I was immediately intrigued, because it was the first time I could actually recall seeing platonic friendship between straight men and women onscreen. Up until then, I’d mostly just seen those relationships played for sexual tension in rom-coms like When Harry Met Sally, Some Kind of Wonderful, Clueless, and, oddly, Win a Date With Tad Hamilton (where the climax is that sure, they were “friends,” but they were really in love the whole time). The friendship in those movies was always just a stepping-stone — a fine consolation that could, and should, be traded for something bigger and better.

Those rom-coms were not my life. I was proudly “one of the guys” and had been for years — so to finally see a version of my experience on TV was exciting. I watched as PJ drank beer and played poker with her male friends, joking with them and seeming comfortable in her own skin.

But there was the problem: I wasn’t sure about the guy I was watching it with. He laughed too hard when Stephanie complained about the guys’ misogynistic behavior, and praised PJ for defending them. He thought PJ’s smoking cigars was proof she wasn’t “prissy.” She rejected her femininity, and that’s what he loved about her. “She’s just like you,” he told me.

My own guys, from before I went to college, were the kind of friends I’d call in the middle of the night with a crisis; friends who’ve been there for me through breakups, friends I speak to deeply about my anxieties and fears, friends I’ve complained to about my period. The kind of friends that, for most women, other women (or gay men) are supposed to be.

I valued those guys because they proved themselves valuable. But I also valued them because I had learned to devalue women. PJ was just like me, and I was starting to hate it.