To most people, One Direction is just a boy band. To some, One Direction is the reason they pursue their dreams, or continue to stay strong on days when all you want to do is just give up. A band can mean so many different things to so many people. For me, One Direction is the reason why my best friend is my best friend.

Now, you may be thinking, “how on earth could a little boyband of (what used to be 5, but is now 4, sadly) boys from the UK make 2 people become best friends?” Well, I’m going to tell you.

Before becoming a part of the One Direction fandom in 2012, your nights were spent on YouTube looking up “One Direction Funny Moments,” “One Direction X-Factor Performances,” and “One Direction Video Diaries.” You’d tell yourself you were going to watch just one more video and before you knew it, it would be 4AM. You’d buy every J-14 magazine just to get the One Direction posters to put up on your wall and if they put Liam on one side and Louis on the other, your heart would have a battle with itself on who you’d choose to put up. I was lucky enough to have my best friend, Kelsey, by my side during the sleepless nights of Youtube searching and poster mishaps.

As our One Direction obsession began to grow, we went to Myrtle Beach together with my family. I remember jumping back and forth on the hotel beds screaming the lyrics to every song off of One Direction’s first album, Up All Night. When “What Makes You Beautiful” would come on, we’d dance along to it with our self choreographed dance. We made up scenarios in our head about going to college together, and then moving to London where we would marry Harry and Niall and be best friends with all the other band members and their girlfriends. (That’s totally still going to happen by the way.)

We’d go to Starbucks and say our names were Eleanor and Danielle just because those were Louis’ and Liam's girlfriends’ names. We talked in a British accents for 2 straight months and ate crumpets and drank Yorkshire Tea just to fully commit to the “we are totally British” thing. We went to their first North American tour and screamed when they walked out on stage because “OH MY GOD THEY’RE REAL. WE ARE BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS THEM.”

Whenever they’d put out a new song, Kelsey and I would listen to the world premiere on BBC Radio 1 via our computer during history class, trying to contain our fangirling emotions so Mr. Lefcoski wouldn’t separate us for being too loud. Then at lunch, we would already have all the lyrics memorized and we’d be passionately screaming the lyrics at the top of our lungs in the cafeteria, to which our fellow students and teachers would roll their eyes and ignore us for the rest of the day but we couldn’t have cared less because we were in our own little One Direction fangirl world. We went back to Myrtle Beach the next year, and this time around, we were singing their second album, Take Me Home, from the balcony to the people down below.

To this day, whenever we have little fights, we don’t apologize by saying sorry, we will just send a plethora of throwback One Direction videos, or lyrics of a One Direction songs, or spam the other with pictures of their “fav.” When any of the One direction members does something, our text conversation will be filled with “SRHVDHSKHDB!” and other words in all caps that only make sense to one another. When Zayn left the band, we cried on the phone for hours and reminisced on the simpler days of a happier Zayn.One Direction will forever mean the world to me because they gave me my best friend. They gave me the person I will always count on, the person who I know will be my bridesmaid, the person who I know will be my best friend forever. The person who I know will be sitting beside me when we’re old and gray and still be singing along to “One Direction's Greatest Hits.”