Leaving your best friends from home can be tough and I am sure most people experience serious separation anxiety from their best friends at one point. However, while everyone makes a big deal out of long distance relationships with a boyfriend or girlfriend, what about the best friends you’re leaving? While it is true that most students attend college and form new friendships and relationships, you will never find friends like the ones you grew up with in your hometown. Your childhood and pre-teen years would be completely altered without these friends, and the memories you created together are the ones you hold onto when you go away to college. Here are a couple of ways to help you keep up your cherished relationship with those irreplaceable best friends.
1. Always plan before you call
You are no longer on similar schedules and you can no longer predict when your best friends will be super busy or completely free to talk. Always shoot them a quick text to see if they have the time to talk because you don’t want them feeling overwhelmed or like you’re calling them too much.
2. Make time to talk to and see each other
If both of you are constantly busy and finding it hard to make time to call each other, try and work out a time a few hours or days in advance that works for both of you. You’re both going to miss out on some pretty important moments if you both let weeks go by without a phone call.
3. You don’t always know what’s going on in their lives anymore
Whether you call them with good news or bad news, you need to remember that something drastic could be happening in their lives too. Before you blurt out your super important news, remember to ask about them first.
4. Have pictures of each other where you live
This way you can always be reminded of them and of course have them there in spirit. I have found that keeping a million pictures around is comforting on a tough day when you really miss home, because after all home isn’t home without the people in it!
5. Constantly be looking at your old memories together, but make new memories as well
You can’t live off of your old memories together for the rest of your life, so remember to look back and laugh at the old ones but also go on adventures together and find ways to make new ones too.
6. Plan to see each other at least once during the semester
Letting the semester go by and not planning time to see each other usually just make things fall apart. Have a set plan that has been in place for weeks, maybe even a month or so before you will actually see each other. This also helps give you motivation to get through the semester
7. Understand that things won’t be the same exact way they will be when you lived close together
Things change year to year. Remember that you can’t live in the past and not doing some of the things you used to do together is okay.
8. Even though they aren’t physically there, they are always there for you
Always feel like you can reach out to them if you’re feeling lonely, never hold yourself back from sending them a text asking to talk about some stuff. If you are the type of person that can’t hold things in, long distance best friends are perfect to vent to because they aren’t always there.
Long distance friendships won’t always be perfect, but communication and effort to keep up with each other is the key to maintaining those important friends in your life that you can’t always live close to anymore.