By: Erin Byrd
Opening up Find My Friends to see that my best friend who once was just five miles from me is now 650 miles away will never become normal. My entire friend group from high school split up for college, ending up everywhere from the Northeast to the South to the United Kingdom. We were inseparable this summer, rarely going a day or two without seeing each other. Now, we’ve been apart for about two months and have to wait another month before our big reunion at Friendsgiving. As our lives at college have gotten busy with work, exams, clubs, and friends, staying up to date on everyone’s lives has become harder and harder. The first month or so, we had group FaceTime pretty regularly and our group chat was as active as it had been in high school. I attribute our frequent contact to homesickness, which was at an all-time high those initial weeks of college. Now, I call one or two of my closest friends every week and usually text everyone daily, but overall I talk to everyone significantly less. I miss my friends but they aren’t here, so it is sometimes hard to prioritize talking to them.
One tip I have is to schedule phone calls or Facetime, even if your schedule seems booked. Planning your calls forces you to fit your friends from home into your day and ensures that you all will be able to talk. Figuring out when to talk to some of my busier friends has proved to be pretty difficult, but it’s definitely worth the effort and it’s so good to hear their voices when our calls are successfully scheduled.
I also like to send Snapchat memories or Google photos alerts to my friends who show up in photos from a year or two ago whenever I get the notifications. First of all, they’re so entertaining, and secondly, they help us reminisce and strike up conversation even though we all lead different lives now. It’s a nice way to remember home and each other.
Though it’s tough to realize that you’re falling out of touch with the people you used to spend all of your time with, it’s equally as tough to maintain contact with everyone as much as you used to. It’s okay if you don’t know everything about everyone’s lives anymore- that will make the reunions all the more special! But, putting effort into keeping in touch with old friends is essential to maintaining friendships.