You may have noticed how some of your friendships nowadays mostly consist of you and your friends sending each other memes back and forth. Maybe you don’t spend as much time together as you used to in high school, when you would hang out at the mall after finals. Now, your routine includes dozens of other people, perhaps even friends you met in your second or third year of college, and no longer includes the friendships formed in your first year. It saddens or frustrates a lot of us when we realize how hard it is to keep friends that we thought we would remain close to.
Some friendships are easier to maintain than others. The ease or difficulty of maintaining those friendships during our college years depends on the context in which we formed them: Have we known each other since high school or CEGEP? Or did we meet at Frosh? Are we in the same program, or do we see each other at club meetings? If we’re longtime friends, do we attend the same university? Different scenarios have their own peculiarities.
For instance, at the beginning of our college journey, we become friends with some students with whom we share several classes. Keeping contact with friends that you see every day is probably not as demanding as making plans with friends who live far away, or are simply too busy. Having classes together plays a huge role in staying in touch, especially when you take into account the sheer number of hours spent with the same people listening to the same professor over the course of an entire semester.
Still, sometimes, even being in the same room for so long is not enough. For example, many of us are familiar with those classmates whom we’re unsure whether to categorize as friends or acquaintances. Few details are known about them besides their name, their major, and their year. Even though college friendships formed in the context of a course might not be as surface-level as our relationships with these “classroom acquaintances,” it’s still important to meet up outside of class time for the friendship to survive. Otherwise, these friends are easy to maintain for the duration of the semester, but they probably won’t last very long once you no longer see each other two to three times a week.
It might be easier to form stronger connections with club members. After all, common interests can bring people together in ways that go beyond small talk. Whether it be a sport, an art form, or a scientific interest, having a common goal combined with regular meetings creates the conditions needed for a friendship to last longer. The same thing applies to friends in your program of study: if you’re both studying biology and planning to go into medicine, you surely have more to discuss, complain, or be excited about than two people in completely unrelated fields. However, you still have to make an effort to expand conversations beyond this shared field of interest in order to strengthen the bond.
Unsurprisingly enough, relatability and proximity are important for maintaining friendships in a college setting. Friends with similar values on topics like family, religion, work, and politics are more likely to invest time and energy into their relationship than people who became friends as teenagers but slowly drifted apart over the years due to their growing differences.
The most important part, though, is making the effort to meet in the first place. It can be as simple as getting coffee together or as elaborate as organizing a trip with multiple people. The essential part is communicating to your friends that you enjoy spending time with them in one way or another. Despite our best efforts, though, college students remain extremely busy. Between exams, part-time work, and extracurriculars, it’s hard to squeeze in time to have fun with your friends in an already packed schedule. Studying in a college setting is already a stressful and time-consuming task, but keeping contact with friends doesn’t have to be as difficult or mentally taxing. As silly as it may seem, friends sending each other funny videos and messages helps to keep that connection alive.
To get a more personal perspective on this issue, I asked a few students to describe their experiences with maintaining friendships in university. One person shared that being in the same program makes it easier for them to keep in contact with friends. Indeed, seeing your friends most days of the week because you have the same courses creates a sense of familiarity between you and your peers. According to the student, that familiarity is harder to preserve when you hardly see your friends in person. In other words, you can “[lose] touch” if you and your friends are in different programs and don’t try to meet frequently.
Another student shared that “[when] only one person is making the effort to maintain the friendship, it’s much harder.” It’s easy to feel underappreciated when a friendship isn’t reciprocal enough. The important thing is to try to build two-sided communication, whether by texting or by seeing each other in person, which can help us feel more satisfied and valued in our friendship. Finally, a third student wrote that it was not very difficult for them to maintain friends in university because they kept contact with people they knew from CEGEP (and they still frequently send them funny videos).
Although it may seem discouraging to some that people may drift apart during their college years, try to remember that friendships come and go. It is eventually up to you which friends you want to keep close. Sometimes, even if you don’t spend a lot of time in person with your friends, it may still be enough to keep your friendship alive.