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Blog Entry: #110

College Student Friend Crisis –
How To Manage Your Old Friends Back Home
by Joe DePalma

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Question: The road splits in two up ahead. One road will take you to places you have never been, and the other one will lead you back home to where all your friends are. Which one do you take?

Answer: Take the road back home. Fill the car with as many friends as possible and find the road to new tomorrows with all the yesterdays that want to come along. And never look back.
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The journey from high school to college is one of the most exciting times in a student's life. Almost every aspect of your life changes when you begin college. However, many students have relationships they do not want to have changed, thus beginning the age-old dilemma of developing new and exciting relationships while holding onto old friendships.

Many students have been hanging out and growing up with the same group of friends since they were infants. Some students even have an old girlfriend or boyfriend from high school that they would like to keep without altering any part of the relationship. However, the hard reality is that students do not have much of a choice. Everyone's world drastically changes after high school and forces each individual to choose a path: the path forward or the path back.

Once you graduate from high school, the pattern by which you have run your life since you were five years old is complete, which leaves an opening for a new pattern to begin. Of course you will want to bring all the safe and fun aspects of your old pattern with you into the new one, but sadly that is not possible. College students have to choose very carefully which aspects of their high school lives will continue the journey into their college experience.

The paradox of the situation is that most students want to bring as much as they can from high school to college. Yet the more aspects you drag from high school into college will directly subtract from your true experience of higher education. A true college experience is about finally taking the training wheels off your life, which cannot be done if you are trying to ride your bike while it is still chained to the front door of your high school. Basically, college is the dividing line between the people and things that really mean something to you and all the comforting but superficial nothingness that high school cliques and popularity contests have forced you to associate yourself with.

As a young student begins to make new friends in college, the eternal freshman struggle to keep up old friendships and build solid new ones begins. When this starts, the best plan of action you can have to incorporate your previous buddies into your new life is to introduce your old and new friends as quickly as possible. Tragically, some students try and keep their old and new friends separate by labeling them as school versus home friends. Unfortunately, this tactic usually results in a steady decline in “closeness” with the friends at home until those relationships are reduced to mere photo album memories.

You must always try and get as many of your friends, both old and new, in the same place at the same time. Of course, this may not be practical in certain situations, but with online networking technology and low cost travel you have the opportunity to gather your various friends together like never before. That's what makes college so great. It's so much easier to make friends through friends of friends. That doesn't work if you go to college by day and live your old high school lifestyle by night. If you keep running home as often as possible, you will never truly get into the college mainstream and you will miss out on all the friends and relationships that are waiting there for you. In fact, the faster you can make the shift from the high school to the college lifestyle, the better off you will be.

On the first full day you spend exploring campus you will discover that there is a whole world of people and excitement outside of your hometown just waiting to be found behind every door. But those doors will never open for you if you do not first attempt to seek them out. It is best for students to view their home and family as a lighthouse. It is good to know the lighthouse is there in case of a storm or emergency, but the adventure is out deep in the ocean, far from land, where a student is completely on their own. That is where the waters of college are the warmest and most satisfying.

Sometimes friends at home will seem to turn against you when you make new friends at school. The underlying problem here is that life is tugging an old friendship in two different directions. What must be done at this point is to come to an understanding that both your lives are changing, and thus the relationship must change as well. The friendship does not have to end, and it does not have to be awkward for anyone. The only thing that has to be done is a little fine-tuning with the realization that nothing stays the same forever. Then the healing can begin, and the friendship will become stronger and progress to a higher level.

Some friendships will stand the test of time while others will not. If it is meant to be, then both you and your old friend will understand each other's changing lifestyle and it will probably work out. On the other hand, if you or your old buddy are just being childish and are not trying to grow together, then that is a sign to take a break from one another for a while. The break does not have to last forever, but space and time allow almost everyone to think clearly and hopefully take responsibility for acting like a childish and selfish dork.

The best way to tell if a friend is a keeper is that true friends always encourage the addition of new friends to the gang. If an old friend of yours cannot understand why you would want more friends, then they have a serious problem and need time by themselves to figure out why they are so insecure and dependent upon your exclusive friendship. If this happens, the only thing you can do is make sure you never stop meeting new people while letting yourself continue to grow, learn, and stay on the road to new tomorrows with a car full of yesterdays.

* ACTION STEP *

List three old friends from home you would like to keep up a closer friendship with:

1)_______________________________________________________

2)_______________________________________________________

3)_______________________________________________________

Now list three new friends from college that you would like to integrate with your friends from home:

1)_______________________________________________________

2)_______________________________________________________

3)_______________________________________________________

Extra: Name two possibilities in which you can take one or all of your friends from the first list and get them in the same place as one or all of your friends from the second list. (Example: A birthday party for you)

1)_______________________________________________________

2)_______________________________________________________

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