Personal Essay: What I’ve learned about friendships in college (so far)
Photo courtesy of Taylor Smith / Unsplash
There’s a multitude of life lessons one can learn in college, like time management and financial responsibility. But some harder lessons are mixed in there as well (such as pretty much anything related to excessive alcohol consumption). The hardest lessons of all, predictably, are the ones about friendship.
Below are some of the most prominent lessons about friendship I’ve learned throughout my college career thus far – and let me be clear, I’m more than willing to bet there are more that I have yet to learn.
The first thing that comes to mind is something that I’ve found to be a tough pill to swallow: you will make mistakes and you will lose friends. The part I didn’t learn until personally experiencing this, however, is that it’s not the end of the world. Everything that happens to you in life that feels like a wrench thrown in your plans is there to make sure that you grow as a person, and college friendships are a perfect example of hard-learned life lessons.
In an environment where thousands of 18 to 22-year-olds are put into the most high-pressure experience of their entire lives, there is bound to be some tension. Nobody is perfect or the best version of themselves in college; that’s just the way it goes. You’re supposed to mess up, and you’re allowed to mess up horribly (and those who think otherwise likely haven’t hit their limit yet). What good is the college experience if you don’t gain anything from it?
Even though it sounds terrifying, if you don’t recognize your freshman self by the end of the college experience, then you did something right. I barely even recognize myself from a month ago. College is a constant state of evolution, and through that series of changes, people will come and go, as scary as that can be. However, always trust that when one person exits, another person enters, and through that, you get another beautiful opportunity to grow.
My next suggestion would be to not be so hard on yourself when these mistakes happen. As a self-proclaimed mistake-hater, this continues to be difficult to come to terms with.
For whatever reason, since I was younger, mistakes have always scared me deeply as opposed to motivating me with opportunities to grow. Trust me, it never feels good to willingly admit that you’ve made a mistake, especially in the realm of friendship.
When those mistakes happen, do not let your mind spiral. Soak it in, and feel that pain for as long as you need to. However, (and this is where I’ve faltered in the past), very few mistakes end up becoming a defining moment in your life. In the moment, it seems overly indicative of what’s to come, but I promise you, mistakes in friendships are needed to move forward. Your best friends will be forever waiting for you if you don’t move on from your worst ones.
It’s also never too late to start making new friends. This one also took me a while to figure out, which seems silly in hindsight, but it’s true. College is the best opportunity you will ever have in your life to make friendships with people, and there are a million different ways to do it.
From classes to clubs and even by randomly going up to people, you can often facilitate a friendship no matter what the circumstance may be. You’d also be surprised to know that sometimes your best friendships won’t come around until the very end of your college career, so always keep a door open.
I’ve saved my best and most favorite piece of friendship advice for last. This piece of advice is a recent addition to my life, but it has saved me from a many spouts of conflict: only make things as deep as they need to be. Originally, I had debated if I wanted to word this as “It’s not that deep” or “don’t make things deeper than they need to be.” In all honesty, I realized that friendships – and their conflicts, in turn – can be deep, and that’s totally okay!
Being able to have those intellectual, bond-forming conversations and confiding in a person about that thing that broke you allows for growth and positivity in a friendship. Having trust in your friendships is the best way to develop them, and it’s harder than you’d think. It’s difficult not to wonder, not to try and be as perfect or as cool a friend as you can be.
The best friendships are flawed. They have their moments of hardship and their moments of joy, and through those moments, those friendships come out stronger than they were before. My favorite way of putting this is that people feel the way they feel, and that’s okay.
Don’t get me wrong – at the end of the day, there is no universal way to solve any friendship issues you may encounter or any direct lessons you need to learn about friendship. I can almost guarantee that most friendship lessons that you learn in college will be ones that you aren’t expecting to learn, and maybe this makes things more comforting.
In the scariest and most transformative period of someone’s life, friendships can difficult to navigate, but trust that things will work out and you will become a better version of yourself by the end of it.
