You’re not always going to look good. Some mornings, you’re going to wake up with a little snot hanging out of your nose and skin that’s more blotches than flesh. It’s going to be a mess. And even though you really want to impress the person you love — and to pretend that you are some permanently-sexy creature that is always at its best — you are going to have to see them. And you want someone who makes you feel loved and welcome even when you are at your least presentable, someone who can make you laugh through your sinus infection, someone who reminds you that you are at home. You want your best friend.

It’s the person you are always happy to look beyond, the person who seems as though they will always be there simply because they always have been. It’s easy to take your best friend for granted — it’s kind of in their job description. Their love is unconditional, and that’s a kind of compassion we’re not used to receiving. When someone offers their entire heart to us on a daily basis with no expectation of compensation, we’re inclined to push it aside. We have bigger and better things to chase after. But at the end of the day, theirs is the love we really need. Their touch is the one that we’re not used to seeing as sexy, simply because we see it as ordinary.

But nothing could be less ordinary than someone who cares about us when it’s least convenient. When you have the friend who is there for you on the night when nothing has gone right and you’re left shivering in the rain and no one is there to pick you up, at least part of you realizes how important it is to have them in your life. At least part of you (and maybe just the cold part) understands that this kind of dedication is rare. Even if it can get lost in the current of daily life, it is something that we might not even deserve, yet is offered to us on a regular basis just because we are who we are. It is real love.

We imagine that there is a whole lifetime ahead of us of mistakes and do-overs and opportunities, and maybe there is. But we allow it to blind us to the happiness that we have with our best friend. We mistake the flame of infatuation for the comfort of a real home in someone’s heart, something that we construct on an unglamorous, daily basis with the person we call our friend. And when you are really with someone who loves you entirely for who you are — and not how new or different or interestingly sexy you might be on any given day — you realize that relationships are all about the supposedly boring things that happen between the big moments. Love is all about just sitting in front of a fireplace, reading a book, drinking some tea. It’s about feeling your best when you’re in the company of someone who cares for you and makes you laugh un-self consciously

And that’s what we all deserve, if we’re willing to acknowledge it’s there.