Online friendships
One of the joys of university is the ability to meet new people from all different walks of life. For the time that you are at uni, you can meet people not only from an array of places in your own country but from all over the world. As great as this is there is, of course, one hiccup. University is not for ever, and just as all those people gathered together for their studies they are just as liable to go out and spread back across the world. Friends you once saw every day for a coffee are now suddenly half a continent away. So how do we maintain these relationships?
With great difficulty, I’m afraid. It is certainly not easy to stay in touch with people who are even just in a different city. One issue for postgraduate research students is the workload. You are dedicating so much of your time to not only mentally challenging work, but to work that often requires a large amount of correspondence. Going out with friends can be a nice change from this; but if you’re emailing or texting friends at a distance it can almost feel like more of the same. Add to that infrequency of communication and all this can make it especially difficult to maintain meaningful conversations.
There really is no easy answer to this – but I can tell you what I have found to be most effective. The best tip I would give is to try and find a regular purpose for getting in touch with a friend. Most people might say this needs to happen organically, and while that’s great, I’m autistic and have never seen the problem with just being direct. If nothing happens naturally, why not go out of your way to do it? This can be as simple as making use of an online game you play together, or a TV show you watch. I would advise finding a different thing for your various friends or friendship groups. This way you not only avoid falling into a pattern of short irregular catch-ups but you also make a person a special part of your life. They stop just being an old friend who moved away but become the person you talk with about what you’re reading, or share workout motivation with, or have a DND game with. This integrates them back into your life even if you still only manage to communicate a few times a year.