In college, of all the people you meet, there are about a handful of people you will instantly want to become best friends with. Finding those you have an instant connection which is relatively easy, but establishing a relationship with them where you can drop by their room anytime and hang out in their room until 2 am doing relatively nothing takes time and sometimes it does not always work out. There’s a delicate balance between seeming too clingy or needy and being too distant. I made the mistake of being too distant with some of my newfound friends freshman year, since I did not want to come off as being the person who clings to every new person she meets. But after I lost contact with them, I realized that by being distant I came off as disinterested. While I do not think I have come off as too clingy in the first few phases of a friendship, I have seen my friends get really annoyed by people who constantly text them after they first meet and based on that, have labeled this person as “obsessed” and subsequently, limited interactions with them. So obviously you do not want to be too clingy or too distant but the question is: how do you find the point in the friendship when you are allowed to constantly be texting them and knocking on their door?
From my experience, once you spend a night in their room until 2 am chatting about life, you’re pretty solid. Those people are probably not going anywhere anytime soon and they like you enough to lose sleep in order to continue talking to you. After that, you are pretty much free to hit them up to hang out with you. The first couple times you ask them to do stuff with you, it may be a bit intimidating since you don’t want to bother them and at first you aren’t sure if they’ll be interested in what you want to do. But if it’s the right person, you will not regret just going for it and reaching out to them. I used to be so nervous when reaching out to people socially since I was scared of rejection or that the instant connection felt when we first met was not enough for a close friendship. After my freshman year, I realized that if you don’t reach out to people you will never know what the friendship could have been. Sure, maybe it’s not ideal to annoy them too much by trying too hard to strike up conversation with them when trying to meet new friends but you also don’t want to accidentally lose what could have been an amazing friendship just because you were too distant. Besides, wouldn’t you rather have put yourself out there and realize the people you are trying to befriend are not who you actually want to be friends with than driving others away by making no effort to develop a friendship with them?
