Shiny happy people holding hands....

I get to wake up next to my best friend every single day.

It's hard to escape thinking about friendships when my future mister and I are currently going down a list of everyone we've ever known and marking them as "yes" or "no" for an invite to our wedding. I feel like as I get older, my friends start to take on a different meaning to me. To risk sounding cheesy, they become more like family...Obviously college was completely different, when we literally had dozens of friends at our doorsteps at any given time. Now I feel fortunate to have a handful of friends that I can trust and rely on whenever life is good, bad, or ugly. I think my friends know that I would absolutely drop anything for them in time of need and I know I could expect the same in return. And as I sit here writing this, I'm thinking of several people who I know would do that, hands down, in a heartbeat, no questions asked. I want to be that kind of friend.

I had a friendship end this past year, which of course has catapulted me into uber-reflective mode. It's not worth going into the details, but what I can tell you is that there was a complete realization on my part that I was being undervalued as a friend. And let me tell you something: that is the worst feeling. That moment in life where you realize that this person doesn't like you. Bottom line. Breakup.

It's more than not being liked though, it's being appreciated and respected for who you are and the roadblocks you've been through to get to this point. And I can say, with confidence, that my friends love me. Am I perfect? Absolutely not. Could each of my friends rattle off my flaws to you? Indeed. Would they? Never.

I get very ruminative when it comes to things like this, mostly because I want to learn from past mistakes. Life is too short to just cross your arms and walk away from something, dismissing the meaning it could have on your own growth as a human being. With each year that goes by, I can't help but notice the new shapes my life is taking. It's hard enough to make time for myself, much less the people that have somehow found me interesting enough to keep them company. But it's worth every second of time that I put into friendships. I guess I just feel lucky.