You slept seven feet away from her for your entire life. You shared the car (when she let you), you shared the TV (when her show wasn’t on), and occasionally when you were willing to fork over twenty bucks, you shared the six inch heels your mom only let her buy. There was no one physically closer to you, and yet most of the time it seemed your older sister was the farthest thing from a friend. When she moved out, you hugged goodbye, but the saying you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone had yet to affect your relationship.
When she went to school, there was no longer anything to fight over, but there wasn’t much to talk about either. Finishing up high school while she started a new chapter in her life made it feel like you were living in two completely different worlds, with no way to communicate. You had no idea what was happening in her life, and without feeling like you could relate, you didn’t care, so you gave up trying. The phone calls were short and the only actual details of her life came from what you saw on her Facebook feed. It wasn’t until you yourself packed up and went to school that you could finally relate to your sister and it seemed that the only-seen-on-TV sister relationship Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have been advertising in their upcoming (and very, VERY highly anticipated) movie was finally beginning to become a reality.
For most, going to college offers us the chance to form new relationships with everyone from the first (and last) frat guy you’ll ever kiss, to the Thursday morning bus driver who plays country music. But for the lucky few, college also offers you the chance to rediscover and reform old relationships, which is precisely why following in her footsteps and moving halfway across the country to college will bring you closer to your older sister than you’ve ever been before.
1. Now that you’re both out of the house, you’re in your own two-person club of “the only way my mother communicates with me is through email”.
2. Since you’ve lived with each other your whole life, you essentially have a new friend who you don’t have to try to impress anymore, giving you the perfect person to call when you are in the middle of an eight hour marathon of Keeping up with the Kardashians, but really feel the need for some human interaction.
3. Explaining the Halloween pictures on Facebook to your relatives when you go home for Thanksgiving will be a little less awkward than expected considering you’ll have your sister by your side to shift the attention to her own costume from 2012 and look how well she turned out…right?
4. Being the second in line, you have a carefully practiced and revised plan of attack when smuggling the extra wine out of the house every time you go home for break, thanks to your sister’s single-handed dedication during her first few years at school.
5. The holidays are now more exciting than they used to be because Thanksgiving now marks the first occasions you and your sister get to see each other and are actually excited about it, which will lead to hours and hours of movie-marathons and eating every homemade dessert you can get your hands on.
6. Calling to complain about your roommate’s SUPER annoying need to keep the thermostat at sixty degrees will make it seem like sharing a room with your sister wasn’t actually that bad.
7. Having your mom read your essays in high school seemed pretty normal, but she hasn’t been in college since before computers even existed, and let’s be honest, how many of us have time to go sit with an essay tutor? Having an older sister in college gives you an up-to-date essay tutor who is bound by blood take whatever crap you have compiled onto a word document and turn it into an A-worthy essay.
8. Not only is she your new role model, your older sister is practically a REAL LIFE ADULT, meaning the interviewing and job searching tips she is obligated to give you will not only be coming from someone who is successful and well versed, but incredibly honest. Sisters don’t BS.
College will introduce you to those people you’ll never want to live without, but it will also remind you of those people you know you’ll never have to. Forming an actual relationship with your older sister is an automatic result of going to college, but finding a best friend in her is a life-changing perk for those lucky enough to experience it.
Images courtesy of: Tumblr, Giphy, US Weekly, Teen