The summer after the first year at college is the hardest one. Granted, I say this having just finished my first year at college; I’ve yet to be home for even a week as I write this. Yet as I write, that prediction seems an entirely reasonable one.

If you’ve finished high school, think about all the people you promised to keep in touch with and vice versa. If you’re a senior, think about all the yearbooks you just signed or are about to sign. (You could probably also think about your middle-school yearbook, if your middle school had one.) It is virtually guaranteed that you will not maintain contact with all your friends from high school. Not all students go away from home, but those who do might find themselves completely isolated from their high school friends. This isn’t an inherently bad thing: you make friends when you’re away at college, and you become close with those friends quickly; that’s a natural consequence of being free to talk and hang out with them until 4:00 a.m.

Realize this, however: your experiences at college change you. You are exposed to ideas and modes of thinking that were heretofore foreign to you. (If you aren’t, you need to transfer; you’re wasting your time there.) You mature in ways you don’t expect. The same things are presumably happening to your friends while they’re at college (once again, if it isn’t, TRANSFER). Simply put, you and your friends grow, and sometimes you grow apart. This is not an inherently bad thing, either; however, it can take some time to adjust to when you come home for the summer—that is, if you come home. (Not coming home for the summer presents its own problems that I can only speculate about, because I did come home; however, I imagine not initially returning home exacerbates these problems when you do finally return to your hometown.)

This assumes you actually keep in touch with your high school friends—that you remain in contact with them and hang out with them when you have the chance to do so. This is not the case with all your hometown friends. You only have some much time to give to people, and you have to choose which people to give that time. After you finish your freshman year of college, it might seem counterintuitive to ignore the friendships you spent freshman year forging in favor of the friendships you may or may not have tried to maintain with hometown friends. This might be part of the reason why you and your old friends don’t talk as often as you used to: you essentially rank your relationships in order of their importance and act accordingly.

When you’re at college, you probably don’t spend as much time talking to friends from back home as you thought you would. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: it means you’re immersing yourself in your new community. (If you’re spending a lot of time talking to your friends from home, that might be a bad thing.) But it does make you think about the people who matter to you and those who don’t matter as much. That was part of the reason I was determined to go home over the summer: I wanted to see which friends would make efforts to keep in touch with me. It’s a bit of a double standard, yes; but I refuse to be the only one trying to maintain friendships. I’m happy to meet friends halfway if they try to do the same; if not, I’d rather give my time and efforts to people who’ve shown they want it.