After nearly completing my freshman year of college, I have learned a lot: do not procrastinate, do your laundry before you run out of underwear, and studying last minute will not help your test grade. By far the biggest thing I have learned is unrelated to school: Not all friends last forever. This is for you, rising college freshmen.
It is obvious that not all friendships are meant to last a lifetime; some are just around for a period of time -- through childhood, middle school, high school, and so on. The end of a friendship is never easy to take, but knowing deep down that it wasn't going to last takes a little bit of the edge off.
The endings that hurt, the ones that cut deep and leave you thinking like something is missing; those are the ones that you never see coming. The truth about college is that you are going to lose some friends -- it happens to everyone. The painful truth is that you are going to lose some of the friends that you thought were never going to go anywhere.
Everything will start out fine. You guys will start talking about how you are going to make absolutely sure that nothing will come between the two of you. A few months will pass and the two of you will still talk regularly, and spend time together over breaks, just like you did before college. You will be confident that your friendship will make it through the year.
Suddenly, the texts, the phone calls, the visits -- those will start to dwindle in number. At first, maybe you might be in denial, school is probably a lot right now, we are still friends... aren't we? It takes a while for it to sink in so you do as much as you can to fill the void. You have your own new friends, and they are great, but you can't help but feel like something is missing.
I understand that people change in college -- well, actually a lot changes. Does enough change to the point where someone who you thought was going to be by your side forever, slowly slips through the cracks to join all the friends that used to be?
I will be the first to admit, it is painful, but it is also the truth. Nothing has to happen. No one has to get mad at anyone, or a giant fight doesn't have to einsue to make this happen. It is just part of life, people come into your life, and people go out of your life. College just speeds the process up a little bit.
By no means should anyone be scared to go to college for the fear of losing friends, because the friends that you will meet will help to fill that void left behind. These people that you are going to meet, they are going to be some of the people that you know will be in it for the long run.
I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that growing apart from someone you thought was a lifelong friend can be a real hit. There will be a space left behind that leaves you wondering where it went wrong, or how you can fix it -- but you don't need to. Some day, if the stars align, and all is meant to be, maybe the two of you will fall back into each other's lives.
