the magic of college friendship

theory: in finding your people you find yourself

Hi! Yesterday I went to Pride for the first time and danced with my friends in the rain. Today I’m sharing an essay about making friends in college that I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks. I hope you like it.

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I joke sometimes that I came to college and became a person. After 18 comfortable years, I had to see myself as a freestanding individual, untethered to my school and my family and the city I grew up in. On top of that, I was responsible for introducing this self to hundreds of new people.

In high school, I never considered who I would eat lunch with. I simply found myself at the same cafeteria table every day, sitting cross-legged in oversized orange chairs, with a tray of plain pasta and chocolate milk. Deciding what to talk about was never difficult. We all had the same teachers and the same tests to study for. We knew all the same people, so gossip was endlessly satisfying.

But during my first year of college, I spent my Sunday scheduling one-on-one lunches and dinners for the upcoming week. I sent and received texts and filled my paper planner with names and times and dining hall locations. I had hour-long conversations with other freshmen, learning about their hometowns and class schedules and how they were adjusting to college. It was fun, but draining. I felt like I was putting reps in but I wasn’t getting any stronger. Not every meal turned into a second one.

Here’s what I learned during my friend dating spree:

1. No amount of time or effort can force someone to become your friend. Once I learned this, I pulled back on the relationships that didn’t feel reciprocated, and I became less anxious. 

2. On the flip side, closeness can sneak up on you. You will feel it all of a sudden. I’ll be a senior in the fall, and I’m living with the same two girls I was randomly assigned to before stepping foot on campus. I joke that we became best friends accidentally (long conversations on the couch, admitting that we don’t actually like everyone we’ve met. Ice cream in the middle of the day. Brunch at 11:30, in pajamas, last night’s mascara smudged under our eyes).

My friends and I debate all the time whether it is circumstance or choice that determines who you form relationships with. I don’t think it’s one or the other. It’s tempting to wonder: would I still be friends with this person if we didn’t share a dorm? But a wise person once told me that life is already so confusing and difficult—we should let some things be easy.

My favorite moments from college have been the ones where hours feel like minutes. Last month, I checked my phone after sitting on the couch talking to my friend Sarah and three hours had gone by without either of us noticing. I cooked an elaborate dinner on my last night of spring break in California, and four of us sat at the table until 2am.

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When I was applying to Yale, I asked multiple current students what their favorite thing was, and they all said “the people.” I found this incredibly unhelpful, and if a high schooler asked me now, I might say the residential college system or the professors or the architecture. But my truthful answer is, of course, the people.

I don’t think this is specific to Yale. I think college in general is the perfect place for friendship. It’s the only time in our lives where we get to live in such close proximity to our friends. I can go upstairs when I’m feeling anxious and eat a bowl of rice and watch Hairspray. I can go up three more flights of stairs and learn how to play Catan and cook Thai food on a faulty oven burner. I can go next door and melt into the blue velvet couch of my neighbors. The openness of college lends itself to learning about each other. I feel so much fuller every year. 

My friendships make me feel human, in a time when I am constantly being convinced that I am a customer and a brand and an avatar and worker and an academic machine. I believe that who you surround yourself with defines who you are. With that piece of information, we have the power to choose who we want to be—and isn’t that incredible?

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In the third year of college, friendship becomes more complicated. It takes work to make friends, but it also requires work to maintain them. We grow distant from others, get angry at the distance, watch our friends disappear into relationships and emerge when they end. Group dynamics shift. We move in, move out, switch living configurations. We fight with each other and think we are both right. 

I had a conversation with my roommates last year about romantic friendships—ones where you are always wondering if they will turn into something more. But I think there is something inherently romantic about all friendship, in its requirement of vulnerability and care and love. Why is it that one of the scariest things in the world is thinking your friend is mad at you?

I spent so much time my freshman year stressing out over friendship (Do I have enough friends? Are my relationships deep? How long will this last?) that I wasn’t grateful for what I already had. I was focused on scheduling the next batch of one-on-one meals, tallying the number of relationships I had built. But my best friends were already around me. I just had to look up.

A lot of people will flock to New York once we graduate, to work corporate jobs in skyscraper offices, to audition during the day and bartend at night, or to attend even more school. We will meet the home friends of our college friends, and the college friends of our home friends. We will try our best to make time for each other. We will find comfort in the fact that we are no longer college freshmen having to start again. We already know each other so well.