It’s Episode 1 of And Just Like That… Season 3, and Miranda is in an environment that plenty of queer people will be familiar with: the club. “Guys, thanks,” she says to Carrie and Charlotte, who suddenly look like the two straightest people to have ever walked the planet. “I couldn’t do another one of these lady bars alone with no one coming up to talk to me….”

“Well, did you try talking to anyone?” asks Charlotte, doe-eyed and woefully naive to the cliquiness inherent to many a sapphic locale.

“Mostly I stood, smiled, and ran up a $37 mocktail tab,” Miranda replies.

Despite Miranda very much being a fictional character—in real life, Cynthia Nixon has been happily married for over a decade, and if she showed up to a club the gays would absolutely freak out—my heart sank. This is awful, I thought, stress-watching through my fingers as Carrie and Charlotte inexplicably leave after someone briefly waves at Miranda (didn’t she just say she didn’t want to be alone?). This is bad wing-man behavior, I fretted, before realizing that it wasn’t quite as simple as that. No, it was more that Miranda—still a baby lesbian in the grand scheme of things, still not a deft hand with a strap-on (as revealed last season)—is clearly in desperate need of some queer friends.

I love my many straight friends—both of them—but having a solid queer community around you is imperative, especially when you’re dating or new to it. You can swap dating stories with that added layer of discernment (straight people might think it’s weird if someone’s best friends with their ex, for example, whereas queers know it can be complicated). They will also want to come with you to the club. They’ll feel comfortable there, which in turn will make you feel comfortable also. They will also know what’s up: If Miranda had gone to that bar with a lesbian pal, they would never have allowed her to have sex with that nun (played pitch-perfectly by Rosie O’Donnell), whom she clearly didn’t fancy that much.

I feel very lucky to have lesbian friends. They won’t question going to the cinema twice to watch Love Lies Bleeding, they’ll be able to discuss The Real L Word—a niche, early 2010s reality show based on The L Word—in astonishing detail, and we’ll probably share the same opinion with regards to the JoJo Siwa and Chris Hughes saga. There’s an element of comfortability and ease that comes with being close to people with shared lived experience, and sometimes even your closest, oldest friends can’t replicate that. When it comes to dating, too, it can help if you know people who know the person you’re seeing, for information-gathering purposes. It’s complicated, but if you’ve heard of the “the chart” from The L Word, you’ll understand.