As we grow up, our friend groups become smaller and smaller, which is strange considering we attend a university with thousands of other people. What happens as we go from grade school to college? Do we change, or does our perception of friendship change?

In elementary school, everyone is our friend. The little girl who lets you borrow her 48-pack of crayons to the little boy who chased you during recess. You tell your parents you want to invite your entire class to your birthday party, along with all of the kids who live down the street from you. These years were a time of innocence, when we didn’t even consider that someone wouldn’t want to be friends with us. After all, we usually had every class with these kids as we moved from first to fifth grade.

Middle school was a new scene with new people. Multiple elementary schools attended the same middle school, and we started to understand what the word “clique” meant. You had your group of friends, but still hung out with whoever asked you. We started noticing the differences between individuals, but it still didn’t really matter to us in the end. The girl you had playdates with when you were little is still your friend, but you also befriend the girl in your social studies class. Soon, all three of you are friends.

You’re finally in high school, and you could not feel cooler. All of the adults you know say high school is where some of their favorite memories were made, and you couldn’t be more excited to finally understand what they meant. There are so many new people in this school, and the friend groups you had in middle school slowly start to disappear. The cheerleaders are only friends with the jocks, and the honor students are a mix of people in your classes. Everyone is starting to figure out where they fit in, and it becomes a time of discovering who you want to be.

It’s time for college, and suddenly you know no one. You go to a school out of state, and all of your friends growing up choose other schools. You promise to keep in touch, but after a few weeks in your new town, it becomes extremely difficult to schedule time for a phone call. Some of those friendships fade away completely as you meet people in your classes and organizations, and it seems like that part of your life was so long ago.

That first semester of college has brought you so many new friendships, but will they last? The guy you hang out with at parties and the girl you sit by in class may not be in your life next semester, their spots being filled by new faces. College is a time of so many temporary things, especially temporary people. Your schedule changes each semester, and so do the people you pass each day on your way to class.

And as college goes on, we begin to discover who we really are and what we want to do with our lives. With this realization comes another: those who we may have enjoyed spending time with last week may not be the people we wish to have in our future. Our definition of friendship is no longer whoever is just nice to us or who we have fun with, it’s who is going to encourage us to accomplish our goals and be there for us when a roadblock slows that journey. It’s the people who will want to know every part of us, from our favorite memories to our worst nightmares. The people who tell us straight up what they think, and who compliment our flaws.

The number of friends we begin college with slowly decreases as time goes on, and when you graduate, you may only have a few of them. These are the people that we eventually realize we can’t live without; the ones you know will be there forever. They will be at your wedding, probably even in it. They will cry tears of happiness when you have your first child, and celebrate with you when you get a job promotion. They will be there until the end. These are the friends that when you realize you have them, you should make sure to let them know how important they are to you. Friendships that last forever are rare, so cherish them.