When I was 16, I visited a good friend of mine at a football game of the school I would come to attend a few years later. While catching up with him, I took a seat next to an older-looking boy with a kind face and a quirky sense of humor. At the time, I didn't know that that boy I had happened to sit next to that day would quickly become one of my most precious and dearest friends, guiding me through some of the more difficult parts of my life and always being there to celebrate in the happy parts. I treasured his friendship deeply, and had anyone asked me to, I wouldn't have given up having him in my life for anything. He was my best friend.

This past week, I let him, and the friendship I had so loved for three years, go.

While I loved being a part of his life, he didn't love being a part of mine. The years of laughter, tears shed in car rides at 12 in the morning and coffee runs before tests masked a friendship kept on a shelf, taken down only when it was beneficial. It wasn't even a friendship to begin with, but rather a business deal, something I didn't realize until my friendship was no longer needed in his life. We haven't spoken since.

I thought I would be angry, sad, hurt. I thought I would feel something at having learned just how little my beloved friendship truly meant to the other person involved, but I wasn't. I wasn't angry. I wasn't sad. I wasn't hurt. I had just lost my best friend of three years to a quick realization that I was simply not worth keeping in his life, but I wasn't any of these things.

I was okay.

The point wasn't that I had lost someone who was important to me. The point was that I had lost someone that I wasn't important to. And while I didn't walk away without a few bruises and a couple scrapes, I was nonetheless okay, despite it all, because I was able to clearly see a relationship that did far more damage than good. I saw the cracks in the foundation for the first time.

No one should ever make you feel like you aren't good enough. No one should ever make you feel like you aren't pretty enough or smart enough or funny enough or good enough – no best friend, no boyfriend, no parent, no fiancé, no husband or wife, no one. If they don't lift you up and constantly wish the absolute best for you, they aren't worth including in the crazy, messy, beautiful thing called life. Relationships, whether they're simple friendships or something much more complicated, are meant to add to your life, not take from it, and if what those relationships are taking from your life is happiness, then they aren't beneficial for you to keep. You're better off on your own than with people who do little else other than tear you down.

Being on your own for any amount of time is terrifying. We're humans, created and breathed into existence to desire love and acceptance. We want that in our lives, and it's not difficult to see why. But you have one chance at this life, and it is far better to find the real love and acceptance that we so desperately want through time than it is to keep a harmful version of it constantly tearing away at your precious soul. So if being on your own for a time means that someday, you'll find true, meaningful, lasting and loving friendships and relationships to last you throughout your life, waiting makes it worth it, because you will be okay. After all, nothing worth keeping ever came easily.