Some of my very best friends I met and befriended within minutes when I was a child. It’s so easy to make friends when you’re younger. There’s no pressure to be likable, and as a kid, approaching someone and starting a conversation isn’t nerve-racking at all. All it takes is one shared interest between you and another girl and you can build a friendship that will last you the rest of your lives. Of course, girl friendships become all too complicated as you get older. There’s suddenly drama over boys or popularity, but even then, my experience is that drama is usually easy to get over when you’re 13. Going into college, I had the preconceived notion that I would make a friend group freshman year and live out all my college adventures with them and eventually, they’d be invited to my wedding. I remember feeling so upset that I wasn’t consistently hanging out with the same people every week and instead was trying to turn class acquaintances into real friends, but never truly clicking with anyone.
By my second year, I only had one genuine friend and we lived together. Making friends as an adult is so much harder because it requires time and effort, even after you’ve established what I call “the click.” Friendships aren’t formed out of the convenience of seeing each other so often because the reality is that you really aren’t seeing your friends every day. You have to carve out time to see each other and catch up on each other’s lives. I love having coffee or doing little study dates with my friends. I slowly found my people within my second year and reached out to them often to check up and see how they were doing. Although I did meet most of them through classes, I knew that I wanted to be good friends with them as soon as I met each of them. College friends are so meaningful because the effort that you put into continuing the friendship is what makes it so genuine. You feel wanted because you both are choosing to spend time with each other. It can feel pretty lonely when you haven’t met your people yet, but it is so worth it when you do.
There were a number of people that I met in classes that I tried to make a friendship out of and it just didn’t work out. Trial and error is really important in seeing what kind of person you click with and want to surround yourself with. It is such a beautiful journey because you end up learning a lot about yourself in the process. I grew up with a small class size in elementary and high school so I didn’t have a lot of options in choosing who I wanted to be friends with. I am still close with my friends from childhood and love them with all my heart. With any friendship as you grow older, people become busy and I still reach out to connect with my friends from high school. That being said, I find that meeting lots of people every new quarter is refreshing and exciting. Anyone you see in your classes could be your new best friend and that is, in all seriousness, how I met some of my closest college friends.
Trial and error is really important in seeing what kind of person you click with and want to surround yourself with.
Not to end on a mushy note, but I have been so lucky to have met some of the coolest people within the past couple of years. It’s wild how close of friends you can become with someone in such a short amount of time. I am truly grateful to have these people in my life and could not imagine college life without them.