What is a real friend? Many of us have made friends over our lifetimes, and many of those friends have come, and gone. Some of those friends have even stood the test of time, and might be with you for the rest of your life, but why? How do we decide in our heads “Wow, I really like this person. Let’s be friends!” How does this process even work?

Let’s think back to our early days. Remember in kindergarten, and early elementary school, when most of the people you considered friends, were mostly friends because your parents knew their parents? That wasn’t really a huge deal at the time, to the average child, because all that mattered to anyone was running around and having a good time no matter what you were doing, as long as you were smiling.

As you got older, and moved on into middle school, you start to notice changes in your friend group, and in your friends especially. People you’ve known for a long time, start to pick up certain interests, that you might not share with them. Your best friend might get really invested in piano lessons, playing sports, buckling down in school, or a multitude of other things, and they don’t really have the time to hang out anymore. Once this starts to happen, some friends will stick around, but some will drift away, and you’ll start to make new friends.

You meet so many more people during your middle, and high school years, that sort of overwhelming. You spend a lot of time around these people, whether it's in your classes, or at sporting events for your school, or anything, really. You start to get along with these people really well, and you become great friends, and it’s wonderful! Until one day you and one of your good friends get in some sort of argument, and the both of you simply butt heads, not because either of you are wrong, or anything like that, but because you’re both so different.

The next frontier, for those of us fortunate enough to make it, is making friends in college. Some people go far away to college, in order to find what they’re looking for in life, career wise, love wise, etc., and end up in a different situation than they’ve ever endured. This is when many of us have to be very selective of the friends we chose to make, if we even have that choice. We spend more of our time with people attempting the same, or a similar major, or we just find people with similar interests, and hit it off from the start. These people are like us, in so many ways, it seems perfect. This is what real friendship is, right?

Wrong. There is no real way to define what friendship is, because at the end of the day, friendship is what you make of it. Whether you’re two very similar people, or two people who don’t have a single similarity between them, what’s really important, is how happy the two of you are as friends to each other. If you’ve got their back, and they’ve got yours, there really isn’t much else that matters than that, because you two are very lucky to have each other.