Aside from my family, there are maybe five people in the world that I can confidently say that I would do anything for. Not in a cliche way, not as a platitude. I have been blessed with friends that I would go to the Valley of Death for. I have friends I would hop in the car, on a plane, on a train, get dressed in the middle of the night for to be with.

When you love someone, it is difficult. It is difficult to watch people that clearly do not love them hurt them. When you love someone, their pain is your pain. Their tears are your tears. There is a special pit in your stomach reserved for the moments when you can’t fix them even when you so badly want to.

But there are some things I wouldn’t trade for anything and getting to love my dearest friends is one of those things.

It is the tragic and beautiful condition of humans that we have the capacity to care so deeply for people that we do not share blood with. Mother bears would surely defend their cubs, packs of wolf families stick together, penguins hold the egg of their future child without wavering. But humans meet other humans— in school, by chance, through mutual experience and we latch on to them forever. We latch on and love.

There’s no doubt it would be easier if we could only love a little less.

When we, ourselves, are crumbling, it would be so convenient to turn off our phones and ignore the middle of the night phone calls, to tell our hurting other halves to wait until we have time, to turn off our hearts for a second. But, we don’t. And we are lucky, because the moments when we need our people to be there for us, their phones are on and their arms are open.

Friendships founded by love so deep are so very rare and so very special. It is from these loves that we grow compassion and the willingness to love people that are difficult to love. If it were not for the unconditional love I have learned and felt, loving those who have hurt me or saw me with indifference would be monumentally difficult or else impossible.

We ought to all spend a little more time looking for the deep, unconditional love that lets us love difficult people. When you love someone, it spills out and consumes your life.

When you love someone, you cannot hate.