Meester said she had a lot in common with Sasha, including her "weird sense of humor" and "resistance to change," and Jacobs, who said she cringed ("in a good way") when she first read the script because of how relatable she found it, said she had some Sasha in her as well. "I definitely had a period in my life where, before I started working a lot as an actor, I was dead broke and all my friends were more successful than I was. I always say I was like Ray in Season 1 of Girls where I was sleeping on other people's floors," Jacobs said with a laugh. "You do have this moment of wondering, Is it ever actually going to work out for me or am I going to be that person that wanted to be an actor and all my friends are moving along career-wise in their respective paths? So yeah, I've been there and I've felt stuck and I've been like, I went to drama school. I don't really have an education and I don't have a lot of other options."

But the actress admitted she can relate to one of Paige's less favorable qualities. "I try to be less uptight than she is," Jacobs said, sighing. "It's so funny because when I was little, I wanted to be a lawyer, and my mom said that she could never win an argument with me because I would always be like, 'Well, actually, on June 3 at 3:15, you said…'"

Although Meester and Jacobs had the benefit of directly working with their source material — Fogel and Lefkowitz — on a daily basis on the Life Partners set, Sasha and Paige don't directly correlate to the screenwriters, who've known each other since high school. "We really tried to make the characters just amalgamations of us," Fogel said. "We don't have the exact issues that Sasha and Paige have in a one-to-one way, like Joni's a lesbian and she's the married one. I'm the unmarried straight one. She was sort of always the optimist when it came to relationships and she sort of wanted to find reasons that it could be the love of her life, whereas I was always looking for flaws in people and being really picky and awful. We brought all of that."

More relatable than its sympathetic, if imperfect characters, however, is the way Life Partners portrays the complexities of female friendship. The film channels the more sentimental scenes of the 2011 comedic hit Bridesmaids, which saw Kristen Wiig's Annie feel her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) slipping away as she prepares to walk down the aisle. The script that Fogel and Lefkowitz (who saw Bridesmaids together with 10 other women and thought about it quite a bit) wrote dives into far deeper waters with those very specific elements of late-twentysomething/early thirtysomething relationships, where best friends suddenly find themselves drifting apart as they approach new milestones. As minor as it may seem, when someone's significant other joins a longstanding friendship TV date of watching America's Next Top Model over pink wine, or when a nostalgic game of Girl Talk gets interrupted by a call from one friend's new so-called "life partner," that's when the rifts in a friendship become most glaring.

Those moments mimic universal situations young women find themselves faced with; none of the elements of Sasha and Paige's friendship depend on either's sexual orientation. And in making their sexualities so tertiary to everything else in the film, Fogel and Lefkowitz were able to create a truly realistic young queer female character. But that wasn't necessarily the way they first set out to make Life Partners three years ago.