I remember hearing once that in college you are going to meet your best friends that you will have forever. Personally, I had several really good friends from high school and I found this to be comforting but also upsetting. I would love to meet some great people to hang out with 20 years from now and say we were best friends in college and never lost touch, but I hated thinking that I was going to or supposed to drift away from my high school friends.

I am the type of person that typically has a very small group of very close friends as opposed to lots of acquaintances. Going into college, I couldn’t imagine losing those friendships because they were so important to me. There were a lot of people that I didn’t talk to anymore and I worried that maybe that was just the natural order of things. As the year went on, I realized that I couldn’t have been more wrong. I lost touch with people that I only talked to when it was convenient and only hung out with when I was all smiles. My three close friends from high school and I had deeper friendships than that. We truly care about each other and love each other and that’s not the kind of thing that just floats away when you all leave for different schools.

I think that the idea that your best friends for life are going to be found specifically in college is a myth. If you have meaningful friendships in high school or from anywhere else they will stay with you. The fake ones will drift away. If you enter into college expecting the meet your best friends in the world your first year, you might end up a little confused or disappointed. I think you can meet your close friends anywhere, and if they are true friends they will stick with you.

Recently I got to meet up with my amazing close friends from high school and we all went to one friend’s condo at a lake. We were maybe going to go swimming, maybe going to go to a movie, or whatever teenagers are supposed to do for fun. Instead, we spent the whole day just talking. We didn’t need anything to occupy ourselves or keep the conversation going, and we didn’t take a single cute picture to post somewhere and show people how cute and close we are. All we needed was each other’s company. I could not be more thankful for those people, and I hope everyone can find those kind of friends. Sometimes you meet them when you go off to school, but sometimes your best college friends are your high school friends that all just happened to go to college.