For as long as I can remember, college has always been synonymous with the words “freedom” and “independence.” “It’s the first time you’ll be completely on your own” friends and family crooned over the years. Looking back at their sentiments, I have to laugh to myself about how wrong they were. One could say I am independent from my parents, sure, but I didn’t realize until it happened that many of us college kids just shift our dependency onto our friends, as they do in return. It calls for a completely different kind of friendship, so unlike the ones in high school. Here are a few of the differences I’ve found since coming to college:
1. Food and my not-so-solo relationship to it. I eat with my friends, beg for snacks in their rooms late at night, grab coffee, or share a bag of candy corn with them in the library late at night. I totally don’t mind eating by myself, but usually I make plans throughout the day to eat with people and it feels so normal. I never spent that kind of time with my high school friends or had to plan that much just to eat. That’s okay though!
2. “There’s nobody to clean up your messes or kiss your forehead here”… well except for your friends. I’ve cleaned up puke, walked friend’s home, delivered meals across campus, and dragged myself out of bed at the middle of the night to help a friend, all happily but also with a sense of bemusement. I’ve slowly learned that just because my mom is 1,500 miles away doesn’t mean there isn’t an army of stand-ins here.
3. One of the hardest adjustments to college life in general is that you can’t go cry under your covers and wait for your mom to tell you to get a grip and go to school. It’s so much easier to disappear in a place like this, and that means that when things head south, you have to just take your friends by the hand and say honestly, “I’m sad and lonely, and I need to cry.”
4. For the first time, you have to make more of an effort in actually being friends. In high school, you’re in a fairly small space with your friends and usually in all the same classes. It was honestly harder to lose friendships in high school than it was to maintain them. However, in college, you have to seek people out to spend time with them, and actually evaluate how to make relationships, a skill I realized I hadn’t been relying on as much as convenience.
The best part about all these changes (and Kenyon) is that because everyone is pretty much roughing it on their own, it will surprise you how much strangers will go out of their way for you and how you’ll go out of your way for them. The mutual terror or adulthood and sort of keeping it together is not a bond you had with your high school classmates. Because we have it here, people will just strike up conversations with you after class or when you’re walking down Middle Path because everyone is in the same boat!
The way you maintain and make friendships may be different from high school, but that doesn’t invalidate your previous friendships nor your current ones. College is all about change, and if you embrace the weird ways it affects your friendships, you may just find something pretty special.
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