So somewhere down the line of my college career, I ended up with a friend group of people who were all a year older than me. This past weekend, they all graduated — including my best friend. I’ll be entering senior year with virtually no close friends, and my best friend who I spent every day with will be partway across the country. I’ve obviously known this was coming for a while, but it’s still scary.
My best friend and I have talked about a number of ways to stay in contact and keep our friendship going. This is the kind of friendship we plan to have for life, but it’s going to be a lot of work to maintain for the next stage of our lives. We obviously plan to text every day, we found this website that allows you to watch Netflix together, and we’ve planned at least a few visits over the next year — he’s a flight (or a 12 hour drive) away.
I’m wondering if any of you have specific things you did to maintain a long distance friendship (or relationship I guess — our friendship isn’t romantic but people joke we’re as close as an old married couple): anything you’ve done that makes the distance feel smaller, things that don’t work, apps or websites or technology that help, or even just general advice for navigating my senior year of college without close friends. I’ll take any help I can get!
I’m a high school senior right now, and I have two very close friends who are going to different cities, and one thing we talked about was doing a sort of long distance book club thing where each of us read a book and then skype at the end of the month to talk about it. Obviously it helps that we all enjoy the same genres of books and are avid readers, but hopefully it helps to keep us in touch.
It’s totally cool to keep in touch with people who moved away, but at the same time, don’t forego new friendships on campus.
Balance. College friends were often life long friends even before social media and text messaging but you have to live where you are and allow your friend to do the same. He needs to make friends where he is and you need to prepare for that to not be jealous.
You don’t mention your plans for after graduation. Will you move to the same area then?
Go with the cues you get from your friend- he might need your support through daily texts in the beginning of the year, but realize that as he gets busy at his new school, communication might be less frequent. And that’s OK. Your friendship will still be there. Hopefully you can see him on holidays. I would suggest keeping busy at your high school during your senior year, maybe joining some new clubs or other activities. This can be a relatively easy way to find people to hang out with. Have fun!
Sorry I misread your age! I hope you can make plans to visit your friend soon.
I was in a similar situation to you, but with high school- my two best friends were seniors when I was a junior, so they graduated a year before me. Snapchat is a great way to keep in touch if you’re into that- we would send each other pictures every day. We also did the watching Netflix together thing, and I would see them when they came home, and I visited each of them at their respective colleges a few times.