Throughout the years, I have had a handful of friends move away and turn into long-distance friends. It is common knowledge that most of the time these friendships don’t remain as close as they once were, even with the existence of social media and all its forms of communication that it has to offer. Distance puts a strain on relationships and you unintentionally drift apart from people that were once very close to you. Whether it was my friend that moved to Ireland, my friend that moved back home to England or my friend that moved two towns away, the convenience of having them close to me on a daily basis vanished and so did our frequent communication. Life takes over and people get busy, make new friends and become too preoccupied to send you a text asking “How was your day?” As depressing as this sounds, that’s just how things go and that’s okay; everything happens for a reason and sometimes people are only meant to be in your life for a short while which is completely normal.
One of the big reasons that once impossibly close friends grow apart due to distance is college. People choose colleges that are right for them which is great, but everyone’s version of the “perfect school” is different which many times results in people going to different academic establishments. While again, this is just how life works and it’s okay, I am lucky enough to say that I have now mastered the art of keeping a long-distance friend.
My best friend since the 6th grade and I go to two different schools and neither of us has a car on campus right now so we can’t just get up and drive to the other’s dorm a million times a week just to hang out. We went from living less than five minutes away from each other to at least an hour without traffic. And while I know that many people are way farther away from their best friends at their respective schools, it still feels like she’s in a whole other country.
Now, at first, it was hard because we both were so busy at the beginning of our first semester. We both were getting out there meeting new people, adjusting to life away from home and just being wicked busy figuring out our new schedules. We quickly learned how to deal with it and set up a pretty reliable system that I would like to share with you all now.
We loosely know each other’s class schedules. Not to a T, but if I wake up on a Tuesday at 10:00 a.m., I know I can FaceTime her and she’ll be up getting ready to go get coffee before her class somewhere around 11:30 a.m. Roughly knowing when the other is busy or free is very helpful. Mainly because then we can FaceTime during those times. FaceTime is a great tool to maintain long-distance friendships. We text each other all day which is great, but whenever we FaceTime it’s like we’re back at home sitting on opposite sides of the room sending each other TikToks. We keep each other up to date with what’s happening in our lives as well. I know everything about her school friends and she knows everything that happens here. By keeping each other in the loop it’s like we’re experiencing the same things. By keeping our communication consistent it’s helped us stay as close as we are. And because we’re an hour away from each other I do get to see her sometimes. Visiting each other once or twice a semester is really nice and makes the times we get to hang out even better.
Even though it is really sad to go from hanging out every day to once every two months, keeping up with each other and updating one another on a regular basis has made this whole experience super easy. After years of friends coming and going and never looking back after moving away, I think it’s beautiful that because of modern-day technology and mutual effort, I am able to conquer the challenges of having a long-distance best friend.