Two factors ensured it would be difficult for me to make friends in college once I finally got around to living there. For one, I’m a transfer student. I didn’t participate in any traditional student rituals. There were no mandatory gatherings that placed me in proximity to people of ages and situations that mirrored mine. The other factor was the pandemic, which kept me from moving to campus immediately after I transferred and delayed me by a year.
Shortly before moving to Richmond, I searched YouTube for other transfer stories but also general college-related tips. Nina Yu’s advice resonated with me the most because of what she says about spending time alone in college:
“Whether you have friends or not, you’re going to be spending a lot of time on your own… You’re trying to get your life together. You’re trying to find a job. You’re trying to graduate. You’re trying to manage everything you have to juggle, so it was actually pretty common to be alone at college.”
With this to reassure me, I knew the first few weeks of adjusting to a new school and a new city would mean being alone. It would eventually change; I just needed to make a real effort. In due time, I would find a crowd of people with similar interests to mine. This crowd would happily absorb me and make me one of them and I’d forget my anxieties from being in a new place. After the first few weeks, though, nothing changed. I wasn’t motivated enough to try new things on campus, and I didn’t want to try anything alone. Instead, for my first semester in Richmond, I spent my time drinking and using dating apps to try to compensate for the fact that I wasn’t trying hard enough to make friends.
I am happy to say this semester has been significantly better because of my better efforts to make friends. However, I still do many things by myself: grocery shopping, studying at the library, cooking in my dorm kitchen, etc. This frequent solitude isn’t necessarily from any failure to make friends. I thought that having a successful social life in college meant spending all my free time with friends. Certainly, this would be great for those who can afford it. Most people can’t, though. What then does that success look like?
Although it’s funny to imagine, there are some striking similarities between the process of making new friends and dating new people. In both situations, you put yourself out there because you’re interested in someone enough to want to get to know them better. Asking someone out or to hang out isn’t necessarily the hard part (although I won’t underestimate the difficulty in doing it.) What’s harder is the maintenance, in staying consistent and in making time for one another. Long gone are the high school days where you could see your friends all the time and the upkeep was practically done for you. When everyone in college is busy and looking out for themselves, it comes down to you to keep up your social life, whatever that may look like. This doesn’t necessarily mean seeing friends all the time or even texting all the time. It simply means enjoying each other’s company when you see them, no matter how much time passes in between.
For now, I have given up on the idea of finding my “crowd” at this point in my college career. What I focus on instead are individual friendships. Maybe it isn’t so important to have a definitive group of friends who all know each other. What matters is having friends at all. What matters is having people in my life who make good company, who carry interesting conversations, who are as weird as I am. What matters is remembering how to try to seek out more of these people. Success has many different faces; recognize them for what they are and know the value in each one.