I see her IRL sometimes and she's always wearing something adorable and carrying an armful of peonies and demurring, "Oh no, you're just seeing my online persona." Then she offers a twinkling smile and excuses herself because she's always on her way to a Special Yoga Class in the Park for Perfect Ladies or something like that. Total girl crush.

The girl crush, despite what its name suggests, is no small matter. As Thessaly la Force writes in W Magazine, "The 'girl crush' may sound ­silly, but sometimes it takes something ­unserious to get us talking about a serious subject: the ambitions of young creative women and the need for ­worthy role models." The girl crush is that woman who seems to have the perfect life. She's someone you want to befriend, if possible, but even more than that, she's someone you want to study, the way all little girls intensely study slightly older girls. La Force writes about her own girl crush, an illustrator and author of whom she writes, "I adored her from afar, and I suppose a part of me wanted to be her."

In the W Magazine piece, la Force enumerates her nominees for inaugural members of the Girl Crush Hall of Fame: "Zadie Smith, with her daring, brilliance, and wild success; Joan ­Didion, with her cool, spare prose; Patti Smith, with her soul and wisdom; Sofia Coppola, with her chic grace and unmistakable taste; and Tina Fey, with her goofy smile and razor wit. Each of them has accomplished something the rest of us dream of doing. And because they’ve done it, we feel we can too." That's what makes the girl crush more than just a regular old friend crush. The girl crush is the mentor (whether she knows it or not), the role model. She's the template for how to do the things you want to do; she's proof that it can be done.

For more girl-crush fun, check out Thessaly La Force's effervescent blog-zine, Girl Crush.