Lessons in life and Leam: distance makes the heart grow fonder

While at university, you can spend ten weeks sharing every aspect of your life with your friends. They are the people you wake up, come home to, go to university, and go out with. They are there with you when something funny happens, or they are the people you are desperate to tell the story to afterwards. Their presence can be something you take for granted, and it is only when you return home that you realise how much you relied on having them around.

Our friends are inescapable at the University of Warwick as we reside in a small university town where we aren’t afforded the same anonymity that students in big cities are. The campus is a sea of faces in which you will always recognise a few, and the bus will undoubtedly contain a mutual friend, an old flatmate, or someone from last year’s seminar. Whilst you might not always appreciate bumping into people left, right, and centre, it only takes a change in perspective to realise how much you cherish seeing a friendly face at random points throughout the day.

We had become so inseparable that people questioned whether we were childhood friends

So, now that you are at home, dispersed across the country, and great distances separate you and your friends, you need to get creative to overcome this obstacle. Here is what I did to help beat the inevitable separation anxiety that will set in during the holidays.

At the end of the first term of my first year, I faced a horrible reality: the next four weeks of holidays would be defined by a countdown to a blissful reunion with my two best and closest friends. In reality, they were two girls I had met 11 weeks prior but couldn’t imagine my day-to-day life without. We had become so inseparable that people questioned whether we were childhood friends. We did everything together. We ate, shopped, attended lectures, went out, and played sports. Going four hours, let alone four weeks, without seeing them was terrifying. So, unable to face this reality, we concocted a plan that allowed us to spend an extra day with each other, delaying the inevitable separation.

On the final Friday of term, we had envisaged one last hurrah at Neon, yet this send-off was not dramatic enough for us. We had frequented this establishment too many times and decided we needed something bigger and better for our last night together. So, on an emotionally fuelled whim, we booked tickets to London. We ate our leftovers from our roast the previous night and sat on the train floor from Coventry to Euston, doing our hair and makeup and prepping for the night ahead of us. We eventually arrived at Clapham, three girls desperate for a new, exciting night out, a monumental event to consolidate our friendship. You’d think this was a straightforward mission in a city of 8 million people, but you’d be wrong. We were refused entry to Inferno’s for not being 21, and other clubs charged £15 for entry – a charge we baulked at because we were students on a budget. We’d already spent £6 on a surplus to the requirement for a Neon ticket, over £20 on a train ticket, and God knows how much Transport for London charges. Eventually, fearing we were close to giving up before achieving our goal, the Heavens smiled upon us as we found ourselves at the infamous arches of the London nightclub.

As far as spontaneous nights out go, this has to be one of my favourites. Three teenage girls alone in a club in the 15th biggest city in the world could potentially be quite daunting, yet we ended up in the one place where no one expressed any interest in us, and we were left to our own devices in the best way possible. It reaffirmed our belief that this relationship wasn’t just a fickle term one friendship but a lifetime bond. We only had to manage three weeks and six days without each other.

I am completely aware this was a dramatic response to a minor inconvenience. So, here are some more realistic, attainable, and practical solutions that my friends and I have implemented to make the distance slightly more bearable. Now that my friends and I no longer live together (one of the aforementioned inseparable friends has dared to go to Australia), we have had to come up with new ways to stay up-to-date with the mundane details of each other’s lives.

Learn to savour this time away from them because as soon as you blink, you’ll be back in your university home wondering where the holidays went

We have created an Instagram account where we all post weekly round-ups detailing the ups and downs of our lives. On it, we trade photographs of Leamington’s high streets and the Warwick Campus with birds-eye shots of the Great Barrier Reef and the Sydney Opera House. It makes us feel closer to each other and allows us to play a semi-active role in each other’s lives. With the girls I live with currently, we send each other the highlights of our day to spark conversation. This conversation moves into long-winded tangents, making it feel like we are all snuggled up in our houses’ sitting rooms and bickering over inconsequential things. Also, we are fortunate as the UK is relatively small, and most Warwick students seem to originate from some London borough or another. Therefore, it makes seeing your friends attainable, and you can make these visits as economical as possible and combine seeing multiple friends into one trip!

So, take it from me, whilst it is undeniably challenging to separate from your friends, the reality is never as bad as you had previously envisaged. The four weeks will fly by. Throw yourself into family activities, make the most of seeing home friends and enjoy everything the Christmas period offers. Your friends are never, ever that far away. Learn to savour this time away from them because as soon as you blink, you’ll be back in your university home wondering where the holidays went and realising that the age-old adage of ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder’ is true.