Managing relationships with home friends whilst at university

As the holiday season is upon us, many students are returning to their hometowns to celebrate with family and reconnect with friends. Between all the essays and assignments due, everyone is making time for friends, whether they be from high school, neighbours or childhood friends. Especially for first-year university students, returning home for the holidays for the first time can feel very strange, and like you are moving back into the past. Returning home can almost force you to re-evaluate your relationship with home friends, both in the short-term holidays and during term time. With the physical distance between yourself at university and wherever your home friends are, changes in life circumstances mean your relationships always undergo a type of shift. They can grow stronger or wilt away. This article will provide some ways of helping to keep hometown friendships strong and healthy amongst the stress of university and new friends.

Make the most of this new age of technology to find meaningful ways to spend time together

Expanding the basis of friendships
Hometown friendships are usually formed in our teen years, or a little earlier, a lot of your usual activities originate from your youth. This can sometimes make the friendship feel immature or stale when really, they just need to alter to fit with this more mature stage of your lives. Explore new ways of hanging out and use trial and error to work out the type of things both of you enjoy, especially over Christmas. Take this opportunity to explore new things to do in your hometown together that you may never have been able to do, due to age restrictions, or just something you never thought of. Allow the friendship and how you enjoy each others’ company to mature as you do.

The beauty of the online world
With the growing cost of living crisis, and increasing prices of travel, visiting hometown friends at their own universities is an expensive endeavour few of us can afford. This becomes increasingly impossible for international students, whose loved ones may be on a different continent. Many of us spend so much time on social media every day, and yet there are countless new ways to spend time with people at a distance, beyond basic Facetiming and messaging. For example, apps like Teleparty allow you to have film nights together from any distance, or binge-watch your old favourite shows together again. With apps like Locket, you can send photos that appear on each other’s home screen, allowing you to keep up with your friend’s day-to-day lives in a low-effort and easy way. There are countless other apps and websites you can explore to feel close despite the physical differences. Make the most of this new age of technology to find meaningful ways to spend time together and communicate during extended periods of distance.

Outgrowing people is a natural part of life and moving away from a friendship can sometimes be the healthiest option

Letting people go
This suggestion is the most important and is also the most difficult to accept. The university experience is a transformative time for everyone. Changes to yourself and your home friends, whether they attend university or not, means that your relationship will likely change. Whether the change will make it stronger or more difficult is unknown. Allow home friends the space to change and recognise changes in yourself that may alter how you interact and spend time with them. Outgrowing people is a natural part of life and moving away from a friendship can sometimes be the healthiest option. If both of you are changing, and they are no longer someone you enjoy being around, allow yourself to let things go peacefully. Not everyone is meant to always be in our lives. It doesn’t diminish the friendship you once had, it just means acknowledging the changes and moving away. For people experiencing university life for the first time this year, this can be extremely difficult and painful, but holding onto the wrong people, and refusing to acknowledge change will hurt much more in the long term. Of course, university may change both of you in a way that makes the friendship stronger and more fulfilling, but allow yourself to let go if it doesn’t.