Legend has it that once you go to college, you will forget about every friend you had for the first eighteen years of your life. Possible? I suppose. Reasonable? Not so much. College really tests old friendships, consistently builds upon current ones, and gives a multitude of outlets for future ones to form. Your college friendships are drastically different from your high school ones, which will either leave you grateful for these old friends, or pushing you to relieve yourself of your longtime friendship duties. Both types of friends are amazing in their own ways, and each individual friendship should be appreciated, no matter the distance between you and your friends.
The major difference between college and high school friends is time spent together. In high school, you’re consistently seeing your friends in some capacity for eights hours a day, five days a week. Chances are you probably saw them during sports practice or extracurriculars after school, along with weekend parties or hangouts. This consistent regimen allows you to develop close relationships through the lens of schoolwork and social lives. You’re living under your parents’ roof, so you share the inability to hangout wherever, whenever. You can bond over the latest breakup, or the extremely hard test you just had in AP Calculus. These simple shared experiences were the driving forces for your friendship. And, if you’re like me, you had been going to school and playing sports with the same people since you were five. So, yeah, you got to know your friends very well.
College friends are a whole different breed. I once calculated with one of my best friends that we spend around twenty hours a day together. Twenty. Hours. Seriously, you become like a family with your college friends. They know every single thing about you. And when I say every single thing, I mean they know the smallest little details, like when you shower and how loudly you brush your teeth. Yeah, pretty weird. In addition to knowing these things, they also, often times, share the same social circle, so the gossip about the breakups is still relevant. On the other hand, unlike high school, chances are you’re not taking classes with your best friends. Everyone is doing their own things and not necessarily on the same schedule as you. This is a nice thing; it allows you to have some slight separation because all that time together is, well, a lot of time together.
One of my best friends in college said it best. She explained a college friendship as having to be a friend, a mom, a sibling, and essentially a therapist, all in one. We rely so heavily on one another because we are without the comfort and support of our own families everyday at “home,” that we often turn to our friends to be everything to us while at school. This is what makes the college friendship so incredibly strong and once-in-a-lifetime. I mean, these are the people who you go to get chicken wings with at 2am, or who you go to to cry about how you’d rather drop out of college than fail your biology midterm tomorrow. Seriously, these friends are like a five-in-one package.
This isn’t to say that high school friendships are bad, in any sense of the word. I am just as close with my best friends from high school as I am with the ones from college, even if it is in different ways. Essentially, these friendships from home have grown tremendously from distance, as the time shared together during breaks is so special. I still turn to these people when I need to rant or need a good laugh. You also have so many shared experiences and memories to look back on, like your countless sleepovers or summer beach trips. I know I will have these people in my life forever, as well.
Finding good friends can be difficult, but having these friends from different stages of your life is so incredibly important and beautiful. The most important thing is to surround yourself with the friends you are absolutely sure of having your best interests at heart. This’ll happen naturally with home friends as your true friends will stay in your life and you’ll drift from the others, but it can be more difficult with college friends. It is important to understand that everyone is busy with their own lives, so you need to pay attention to who makes time for you, as well as who you make time for. Although these two types of friendships are drastically different in their own ways, their similarities will ultimately help you decide who is worthy to keep around forever. I am so lucky to have these forever friends from home and college!