Are We Actually Making Friends in College, or Just Following Each Other?

Walking around campus with 500+ mutuals doesn’t change the underlying reality of waiting up in your dorm room alone for someone to want to hang. The first week of school is full of exchanging socials, hitting the age-old “we need to hang, we’ll make plans!” and then feeling assured you’re growing a never-ending social circle. 

Suddenly it’s fall, midterms are coming around, and you want to study with a buddy. Then it dawns on you that you have 300+ views on your story, yet no one to text when you want to study in the library. 

Let’s talk about why this happens, what it feels like, and how to overcome this. 

The Illusion of Proximity

Social media makes us replace intimacy with passive observation. You can know who they went out with on Friday, their dog’s name, or where they traveled over the summer. Then, when it comes to passing one another on campus, you both just glance and keep it pushing. 

This is the digital proximity casting the illusion of them being familiar to you, since they’re broadcast on your screen every day. The mutual follow was not the start of the friendship but the entire relationship in itself. 

The Missing Effort in a Digital Era

In reality, building a real friendship requires 3 big things that social media removes: vulnerability, awkwardness, and face-to-face effort. 

Online, we all try to present our most aesthetic, favorable, and least messy versions of ourselves. Lacking the vulnerability it takes for people to understand the real you, since it feels more high-risk than it truly is. 

It can feel much easier to react to someone’s story than to see them in person or straight up message them and ask to grab coffee or lunch together. Just making subtle moves on social media causes us to avoid that necessary awkwardness of building friendships. 

Efforts of Turning Mutual into a Real Connection

Does it feel like your feed is crowded, but your circle is empty? 

You might need to break out of the digital autopilot. 

Try replacing the short story reactions with low-stakes plans: “I’m grabbing an iced matcha before our 2 PM lecture, want to walk over together?” Don’t be afraid of some awkwardness; it is a part of the process. 

If you don’t share lectures, try “Hey, we follow each other on Instagram, but I don’t think we’ve actually introduced ourselves properly—I’m [Name]. I see we share some of the same hobbies; would you ever want to [insert hobby] together?”

Real friendships form through shared friction and regular presence 

The Final Push of Courage

College is romanticized as an era of instant, effortless soulmates, but genuine friendships don’t materialize just because two people hit the “Follow Back” button. Stop measuring your belonging by the size of your mutuals list. Put your phone face down, take the risk of introducing yourself to others in real time, and build connections that last long after you log off. 

• BFF
• college
• digital era
• friends
• friendship
• life
• social media