The best friends are loyal to you and honest with you. You need both, not one.

Loyalty without honesty gives you an audience, and honesty without loyalty gives you a critic. Neither is enough alone: the first will clap while you walk into something avoidable, the second will be right about your mistakes without being in your corner. What you want is somebody who tells you the thing nobody else will and then stays.

Work out which half you are better at and practise the other one. If you are the loyal one, say the awkward true thing to a friend this week, kindly and once. If you are the honest one, turn up to something of theirs you do not care about.