Despite the excitement of new beginnings, moving to university is often a daunting, unknown time.
One of the things I was most worried about when moving to university was how I was supposed to maintain my friendships with my friends from home, who were either staying in my home town or moving to other universities. For the first time, we wouldn’t be a 10 minute walk away from one another, but hours away.
In some ways, I had a bit of a head start to prepare, because I’d done a gap year whilst lots of my school friends went straight to uni, so we were already doing long-distance friendships. However, when I moved away too, it felt like we were never in the same place or free at the same time.
Long distance friendships don’t mean the end of your bond, and this should show you that you can, with a bit of effort, maintain these friendships fairly easily. Today, I want to impart some of the ways I’ve dealt with this changing friendship dynamic, in the hopes of helping you with the transition to university too.
My biggest and most obvious tip is to try to arrange a date to see your friends! Even if this is months away, such as over the Christmas break, having a time planned to meet up gives you something to look forward to, and makes the time you’re apart feel more manageable! If it’s feasible, you could invite them to stay for a few days in your uni city or suggest going to visit them, then you have a designated time to see each other planned in!
My next tip is to check in with your friends regularly and talk about your current lives! It can be so easy to slip into a pattern of reminiscing about old times, but this can make your friendship feel a bit stagnant, especially if you always end up re-hashing the same topics! Try to update them on your current life, the people you’ve met in freshers’ week, your lectures etc. I love to communicate through voice notes as it feels like we’re having a face-to-face conversation even if we’re both busy! You shouldn’t need to contact true friends every day to remain friends, but having fairly regular catch ups and hearing about their current lives is an easy way to keep the friendship alive.
My next suggestion is to arrange a facetime date. Whilst calling your friends regularly may seem like an obvious solution to managing long distance friendships, life often gets in the way, and suddenly it will have been weeks since you last spoke! So, try to set up an activity to do together on facetime! This could be cooking dinner, baking, watching a netflix show, or listening to a new album together. This is a fun way to catch up that mimics going out and doing something together, even when you’re miles apart!
In a similar vein, if you’re part of a bigger group of friends, why not set up a Zoom quiz! This is definitely inspired by my own group’s activities during the Covid lockdowns – we hosted a weekly quiz, and each week a different friend would host it and come up with questions! I’m not saying you need to do this every week, but an interactive activity like this can be a great way of keeping in contact and doing something fun, even when your friends are dispersed all over the country or even the world!
You could also set up online games to play with your friends. If you like video games, you can call while you play these – my boyfriend loves to do this with his friends because it gives them something to do while they talk. For me, I love the gamepigeon games on iMessage like darts and basketball, or apps like Words With Friends that you can pick up whenever you have time. This is great if you’re busy, as you don’t need to both be free at the same time to play together!
Lastly, it is important to remember that, unfortunately, not every friendship will last whilst you’re at university. Being forced with a group of people every day, such as school or work friends, can make a friendship feel indestructible. However, I’ve lost contact with people who I thought I’d be friends with forever, and stayed close with people I never expected to. Don’t overwhelm yourself trying to uphold every single friendship, and remember that whilst it can be so painful to let certain friendships go, it is often an unfortunate part of getting older, so don’t beat yourself up about it.