During my life, I have lived in five different cities – two in Germany, one in England, and two in the United States. I have been lucky enough to find friends in all of these places. I have learned how to keep friendships and I also found out which friendships were meant to last. If I can keep in contact with friends thousands of miles away from me, I feel confident to say that these will be my friends for life.
Communication is key to long-distance friendships. If it were not for social media such as Whatsapp, Snapchat or FaceTime, it would be much harder to stay in contact. I text with my friends every day and have Snapchat streaks that are longer than 800 days. It is a couple of people, but I value my friendships with them so much, that I am happy to take a couple of minutes out of my day to check in on them. We barely find time to actually FaceTime, because most of my friends live in different time zones than me. Yet, sending a quick message to ask how my friend’s day has been so that they can either tell me about their beautiful day or rant about how awful everything has been, can go a long way.
Another small thing one can do is send little presents – I do not mean spending tons of money on expensive gifts. Just the other day, my friend and I went online on a food delivery website in the UK and send our friend, who is studying abroad at Oxford right now. We proceeded to order a waffle with ice cream to her dorm to surprise her. She was completely surprised, absolutely loved it and it only cost my friend and me a couple of dollars.
These small acts of kindness go such a long way for any friendship – but especially long-distance ones.
Even though it is so hard to have friends who are so far away, and I miss them all the time, it makes the reunions that much better!