Your boyfriend or husband don't count and neither does your family. Maybe you know what I am talking about or maybe you aren't quite sure yet. I am talking about that once in a lifetime best friend that some would even call their soulmate of a friend. I think you normally find this friend somewhere along the lines between middle school and college. Maybe you have had that best friend since you were 3 years old because her mom is also your moms best friend.

I was not lucky enough to be born with an automatic best friend at my side. I was fortunate enough to have plenty of friends and be involved in sports and clubs. I had the few same friends throughout elementary school and middle school really switched things up. High school switched things up even more in my life! Yes, I still had a few very loyal friends from elementary school but they weren't my best friend.

I had a best friend. We played a travel sport together but we were relatively opposites. We spent almost every weekend from September- March traveling to different tournaments, staying in the same hotel rooms, eating every meal together, laughing, crying, all of it. We stayed best friends and our friendship grew even more over the years. We had a few hiccups as every friendship does but we were friends for years. She was my only friend that was allowed to stay over on school nights, we were allowed to pop in and out of each other's houses because our families welcomed us in open arms as 1. We even went on vacations together.

What really set our friendship apart was how well we knew and understood each other. We were always happy, always a team, always doing what was best for our individual self and the other one supporting it. We did bat shit crazy shit and we would laugh about it the next day because we knew it would be another story to add to the list of things we had done together and somehow survived.

We would hang out with anyone and everyone but everyone knew that we were best friends. When you got one of us, the other probably wasn't too far away. It didn't matter who we were with or what we were doing because we knew that we would have a great time since we were with each other and could always make ourselves laugh.

But then everything changed.

I started dating a guy in our friend group. We were all pretty close but he asked me to his junior prom and I was only a freshman.

We started dating, it was a big "out of the friendzone" sort of thing and my first real relationship. My best friend supported it and went on as nothing had changed. We were still super close and now we all hung out even more.

I knew she had a quick thing for him when we were in middle school but I never paid attention to it because it didn't work out and he was older so we quickly moved on to boys our own age at the time.

11 months in, I was having a girls night with two other girls and they were at a party together. I had been arguing with him that night because I didn't want to go out, I had plans for a girls night.

His phone died.

A frantic phone call from my bff the next morning, he had cheated on me, with her.

She came to me to admit it before I heard it from someone else. As if that was better than hearing the news I had already expected from the pit in my stomach that I had all night long. I now realize that it is better to hear it from someone. That it takes courage and people do make mistakes.

I also know that I do not have to forgive someone before I'm ready and that I can just leave her out of the rest of my life moving forward. That someone that would betray me like that doesn't deserve to be in my life.

At the moment, they were both dead to me and I even lost myself.