Changing Friendships

One of the most phenomenally difficult experiences in college is accepting your friendship changes. For years, you’ve been attending school with the same people and now, suddenly, they are no longer accessible in everyday life.  There are loads of new people around, but as hard as you try, they will not replace or become the friends you made in high school. They haven’t known you for four years or watched you grow from a freshman to a senior. In addition, staying in contact with your previous best friends is going to get difficult, because oftentimes, you are left with the choice: go out and create relationships with new people or stay in to keep in contact with old friends.

Photo from Flickr.com by Lenaas

Even if a happy medium of creating and keeping friendships is established, your friendship base is going to change.  There will be a period of floundering in your first year, wherein you realize that your good friendships at college nowhere amount in length to your friendships from the year before.   As difficult as it is, you will get through it.  Your college friends are experiencing the same realizations, which is something you can bond over.  Personally, one of the strongest bonding moments with my good college friends was when we talked about the changing of friendships and reminisced on past friendships.  In addition to finding common ground, we were able to hear each other’s past stories, further cementing relationships.

When summer rolls around, you’ll be facing the same problem, except backwards.  All of your high school friends are now available and you can make up for all the time lost, but don’t neglect the college friends.   Your amount of contact with them over the summer will dictate what you come back to sophomore year; you could have your same friends, or you could be forced to create an entire new friend group.

Sophomore year is going to be another tough one for friendships.  You may discover that your closest friends last year, in reality are extremely dissimilar to you.  Keeping in contact with high school friends is going to get even more difficult.  But this is also the year when you find your best friends, even if they are not who you expect them to be.  They are the ones that are there for you through the struggles, the stress, the transitions. You will always have your high school friends to fall back on when you return home, but at school, these are the friends you are with almost year round, who have seen you grow from an insecure freshman to an upperclassman. Either way, now is the time you make friendships for life; it’s your choice who it’s with.