The side hustle of friendship maintenance at university

How many times have you felt disregarded by your ‘home friends’? How often have you felt uncared for, seeing them posting highlights on their stories whilst you stay on delivered for who knows how long? These feelings are common and valid, but also think, how many times have you been on the flip side?

It is the part-time job that no student realises they have applied for once they have been at university for a few months. How does the transition from home to university reframe the way that we think about friendships? As someone who has moved schools many times in her life, I have experienced the difficulty of maintaining friendships quite a lot – but friendship maintenance at university brings many new challenges and difficulties.  

we forget about others when we are in the middle of a major change in our lives

The collective process of moving to university spikes new struggles for students: adjusting to living away from home, taking care of yourself, exploring new areas, and building a social life. I personally thought that making friends wouldn’t be too challenging as I have moved schools several times before, but I still faced this overwhelming struggle. Whilst you are trying to navigate this new lifestyle you can sometimes forget that your ‘home friends’ also have their own changes happening in their lives. Whether your friends go to university or not, they are still adjusting to an adult lifestyle. Sometimes, naturally, we forget about others when we are in the middle of a major change in our lives, which is what adjusting to university life is.  

Undoubtedly, you are likely to feel pressure when coming to the realisation of these two lives that you are trying to manage: ‘home life’ and ‘uni life’. Especially within our interconnected world it can feel like there is a constant need to be able to reply to someone ASAP. But the reality is sometimes it is just not possible.  

It can start to feel like you are failing in maintaining your friendships, especially if you are putting more effort into developing your new relationships with people in your course, flat, societies etc. However, the jump to university can act as the step to adulthood that we really need. Once you finish university you will probably then find it hard to maintain your friendships from university whilst you are trying to find job opportunities and trying to connect with co-workers. So, is this just a never-ending cycle of making new friends and leaving old friends behind?   

the true root to maintaining friendships is resilience

What you start to discover (as someone who still talks to friends that I have not seen in nearly three years) is that the true root to maintaining friendships is resilience. Whilst you no longer have those daily interactions with your friends, one of the benefits of the world’s interconnectedness is the simplicity of sending a text message. I mentioned earlier that this simplicity can also bring added pressure, but you don’t have to be checking in with people 24/7. One of my strongest friendships has lasted for nearly six years now and we message maybe once every three months, and we have seen each other four times since leaving secondary school. This may seem like a friendship that holds no depth, but when you mature, so does your ability to manage “low-maintenance” friendships.  

The key to maintaining friendships whilst at uni is understanding that the access to the hyper-connected world is a helpful tool, but it is not an obligation, and that maintaining a friendship takes resilience as well as space to understand the growth and changes that you are collectively going through.   

recognise the difference between low effort and no effort

Whilst resilience and understanding each other is important, the ability to recognise the difference between low effort and no effort is also highly significant. There is no direct guide to navigating how to maintain friendships when you make the transition to university; maybe you are someone who goes home every weekend, so you see people regularly, maybe you only go home for the holidays. Either way you will be discovering a new field of friendships and finding ways to keep in contact with people.  

Distance isn’t always the prime factor to a stable friendship but it is the root of that care for one another which can survive and when that is looked after it can be maintained, even if it is a text once every other month, or not seeing each other till you go home.