Friends

I have heard countless times that college is the time when you make the friends you will keep for a lifetime, and although I really do believe that, I have realized something recently that had never been so clear to me as it is now: it is far easier to make enemies than it is to make friends.

I have made a few close friends here at college, don’t get me wrong, and it isn’t like I am doing poorly from a social standpoint, but anyone who has recently made the move to college knows that it is far easier to have people accidentally hate you than it is to have them actually like you.  I was one of those people in high school that people didn’t give a second thought to.  I was quit, reserved, and kept to myself around new people, and around people I was close to I was a little obnoxious, loud, and a bit crazy.  I could go from not speaking to anyone to being the guy you almost had to pay attention to in no time, and I had no problem being either way.

In college I tried to keep myself from slipping back into that weird high school phase, and for the most part I have been doing alright, but in my attempts to make friends I have found it extremely easy to push people away on accident.  I shouldn’t have been surprised that I have no idea on how to relate to girls as just friends, and I shouldn’t have been shocked that guys can be just as difficult to deal with if you don’t fit in their little group.

Everyone in college is trying to define themselves, and seemingly the best way to do that is with the people around you.  People deliberately choose their friends as a type of representative image of themselves.  So if someone isn’t exactly what you look for in yourself, then you push them out to save your own image.  We don’t think about it, we don’t do it actively or consciously most of the time, but we do it, and for people who have no idea how to define themselves in the first place, it makes everything a little weird in college.

I know for a fact it changes as you get older, but one thing for sure right now is that making friends is far more difficult than making enemies, and I have done my fair share of both in my first year of college.  Hopefully the number of close friends made will some day outweigh the magnitude of the hate that is felt far too often with some of the people I have met.