When I was fourteen years old, I started high school. Terrified as I was on that first day, within a few weeks I had the friends I knew would last me a lifetime. We saw each other every day and texted every night. We decorated cakes for each other’s birthdays and scared the living hell out of each other with surprisingly realistic One Direction cardboard cut outs during sleepovers. We cried together during the hard parts, and let our laughter make up for it tenfold during the good parts.
By the time graduation rolled around we were sure it was going to last forever. I had heard my fair share of sage advice from wise elders (maybe a year or two older than myself). I would tell them how my friends and I would stay in touch; they would laugh nostalgically and tell me how they had thought the same.
I told everyone that I was sure this was different. That nothing could pull us apart. But in the back of my mind, I was terrified. I wondered how our tight-knit bonds would endure once we were spread out all across the time zones. Our friendship had been built on close proximity and constant interaction. How could we ever hope to replicate that?
After a month or two of college, with constant missed calls and unnoticed text messages, it became clear to me that we couldn’t. Things change in college; everyone is starting a brand new life, and the pressure to get involved in a new world while simultaneously maintaining a perfect model of the old one does more harm than good. By trying to talk every single day, not only were my friends and I adding undue pressure to ourselves, we were turning friendship into obligation.
It’s been well over a year now since graduation, and we never did manage to replicate exactly what we had in high school. But what we did find is something just as meaningful. We don’t talk every single day. We’ve started new lives, met new people, and discovered new passions. It makes it that much more exciting when we come back together for trans-Atlantic Skype calls or Winter Break reunions and get to catch each other up on who we’ve become.
You can be on the phone with your out-of-state best friend from high school every second of every day, but by doing so you keep each other from the chance to live your own lives, and may eventually resent each other for it. Instead, sometimes you have to trust that your friendship is strong enough to put down the phone for a bit and know your friend will still be there on the other end when you need them.
Friendships are living things just like people: they need to have the freedom to grow and adapt if they are going to survive.
