When my freshman year of college rolled around, I quickly came to the stunning realization that if I wanted any friends in college, I was going to have to make them.

I went to the same small school with the same small amount of people from kindergarten to senior year. Friends felt built-in there. Since I was five, I had never been in a situation where I had to go out on a social limb or “put myself out there.”

Growing up, I don’t recall ever hearing anything remarkable said to me about friendship. I spent time with people, I called them my friends, and I knew that not having friends was a bad thing, but beyond that, I didn’t give a lot of concern or receive a lot of direction about friendship.

My first semester at college, when I realized I had to make friends basically for the first time ever, I honestly didn’t know what to do. I could have really gone for a “10 Fool-Proof Steps to Make Lifelong Friends” list or an article detailing how not to be a social nightmare. But instead, I just launched into my freshman year with little idea how to meaningfully interact with people.

I was anxious every time I hung out with others, and I questioned whether or not I actually had any friends or if people just tolerated my presence. I began to realize that friendship is a really important thing, but I still wondered what a “friend” actually meant and how I was going to create any close friendships with people who were currently strangers.

Amidst the anxiety, I silently hoped for an easy answer to drop out of the sky. Then, in one of my college courses, we began reading works from philosophers like Aristotle and Cicero, who happened to write a lot about friendship. I was expecting my first encounter with solid friendship advice to come from a mentor or even a self-help site or something, but nope; it came from a couple ancient Greeks and Romans.

Those texts I read in class gave me a big hint about friendship: there is no easy answer.

Friendship is largely about reciprocity, love and effort, but it’s also largely about living it out and figuring it out as you go. I started trying to pay attention to friendship in these ways, and it apparently worked because by the end of my freshman year, I made quite a few remarkable friends.

I’ve learned a lot about friendship this past year. But there’s also a lot that I’ve yet to learn. Like every aspect of living the good life, there’s no simple formula or three-minute article to implement to suddenly “do it right.” Friendship is something that takes time, practice and a lifetime to fully understand and explore.

That sounds like a big deal, right? So here’s my problem: no one ever seems to talk about friendship. Or at least not with the importance it deserves.

I’ve talked to countless people who’ve told me about the importance of family, and likewise, anywhere you turn, some form of media is giving you tips on attracting a significant other, being a good partner or getting over a breakup. Romantic and familial relationships dominate our culture's conversations, and they are extremely important — don’t let me try to convince you otherwise — but the non-familial and non-romantic make up the majority of relationships we have with other humans, so why don't we talk about friendship more?

Now that I’ve begun to find out how rich and beautiful good friendships are, I’ve begun to get more frustrated that I didn’t know anything about friendship sooner. I’ve realized that I wasn’t the best friend I could be to my friends from home. I didn’t properly value people, I didn’t give relationships special time and effort and I unintentionally treated friendship in a utilitarian way. And the most irritating part is that I only did so because I didn’t know any better.

It took reading "Nichomachean Ethics and On Friendship" for me to gain any understanding at all about friendship. I know ancient philosophers are consistently on point with the things they discuss, but I think it’s unsettlingly telling about today's culture that the media and people in general rarely meaningfully discuss friendship.

I still don’t know everything about friendship, but I do know that it is a huge part of life and, by nature, is a relational thing. It’s something that needs to be constantly practiced with others. Good friendship deserves to be discussed and lived out in real, deep ways.